By Hugh Ware
Necessary repairs to locks on the Columbia and Snake River will close the two rivers to barge traffic for three months. Much barge-carried cargo will shift to semi-truckers and trains, although wheat growers have stored grain and stocks of petroleum products filled all available tankage, much of it in the idled tank barges.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In northeastern China, a sand-dredging barge flipped in rough seas. A helicopter saved three crewmen but another eleven were missing.
In Yemen, the small Syrian livestock carrier Gamma Livestock 12 had a fire in the accommodation area so its crew abandoned the ship and its livestock (probably sheep), and the ship ran up on the beach about eight miles north of Kwawkhah. In the Caribbean, the tanker Azra-S went aground because of heavy seas and two weeks later it was refloated by the St Croix-based tug Storm. At Oxelosund in Sweden, the tanker Chantaco was driven aground by heavy winds during the night but was underway the next day. Off Brisbane, Australia, a sudden failure of steering put the containership MSC BaselCommodore Straits onto the Yule Sandbanks. After being freed, the ship was detained while investigations took place. On the St Lawrence Seaway, the Canadian tug went aground while pushing two barges. Both barges took on water but there was no polluting spill.
In the North Sea, some 30 kilometers off the Dutch coast, the Greek tanker Mindoro carrying jet fuel collided with the Cypriot container ship Jork Ranger. The holed tanker spewed jet fuel for a while but the leak was quickly contained.
At Lami in the Fijis, the sizable ro/ro Suilven was the star in an Emergency Planned Beaching (yes—“Emergency Planned …”) to repair its starboard propeller, damaged by entangling fishing lines. In South Australia at Port Lincoln, the bulker Grand Rodosi approached a pier. It overshot the desired berth and crashed into the tuna boat Apollo S. The FV slowly heeled over as fiberglass gave way and it sank within half an hour. The grain ship was arrested as part of a $28 million legal action but soon sailed with a full cargo. (Port Lincoln is featured as the major Australian loading destination in many books about the grain trade and square-riggers.) Speaking of square-rigged vessels, in nasty conditions about 100 miles off the Isles of Scilly in western UK, the Polish barque Fryderyak Chopin lost its bowsprit, quickly followed by both topmasts, and had to be towed into Falmouth. None of the 47 people aboard were injured but the ship was a picturesque old-time-y mess with yards hanging down and lines trailing overboard.
A female cadet fell from the rigging of the German Navy’s square- rigged training ship Gorch Fock to the deck. She died in a Brazilian hospital.
A Coast Guard helicopter took an American mariner suffering multiple leg injuries off the northbound 831-foot tanker Sierra 284 miles southwest of Sitka. He was injured when a deck plate fell on his legs. And perhaps the same chopper rescued a Chinese fitter from the 890-foot container ship Ever Unique 54 miles south of Dutch Harbor. He too had leg injuries but they were inflicted in the engine room.
Gray Fleets
The smallish (150 tons) South Korean Navy patrol boat Chamsuri sank after hitting a protuberance on a larger (270 ton) fishing boat. An injured sailor died in the hospital on Jeju Island.
The US Navy will station 24 women officers in teams of three or four on the following subs: USS Wyoming and USS Georgia, both based at King’s Bay, Georgia, and the Bangor-based USS Ohio and USS Maine. The lone head for officers on each sub will be fitted with a reversible sign.
Where was the US Navy born? At least five saltwater communities still lay claim although Congress decided in 1965 that Whitehall, New York (on Lake Champlain several hundred miles from saltwater!) was the real birthplace. The claimant communities are Beverly and Marblehead in Massachusetts; Machias, Maine; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Providence, Rhode Island.
The Australian Navy had to fly naval cadets to New Zealand for sea training on HMNZS Canterbury because Ozzieland’s two training ships, HMAS Kanimbla and HMAS Manoora (both ex-US LSTs), were under repair.
Did you know that little Thailand owns and operates an aircraft carrier? The “Offshore Patrol Helicopter Carrier” HTMS Chakri Narubet is the world’s smallest jump-jet carrier but can operate 18 VSTOL or rotary aircraft.
Has the Royal Navy hit upon hard times? One might think so. Stringent budget cuts will harm all UK military services but those for the Royal Navy approach ridiculousness. For example, the Senior Service has two large aircraft carriers under construction. Political realities ensure that both will be finished but one will carry troops and helicopters upon completion, and the other will have no aircraft until the VSTOL version of the Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is delivered in 2020 (if that version is not canceled by US budgetary cuts.) The carrier/s could have had some VSTOL fighters up to then except that the Harriers are scheduled to be deleted. (And what then would be available to defend the Falkland Islands a second time?)
French Rafale jet fighters might fly off the new carrier(s), a prospect that angered many Brits. The arrangement would give France a “permanent presence” at sea even when its single carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is down for maintenance.
Privatization of the Royal Navy’s nuclear base at Coulport on the Clyde is in the probable future. A consortium that includes the US firm of Lockheed Martin is in the running for the job of storing, processing, maintaining, and issue of the Trident Weapon System and all ammo for the base’s four submarines. Letting a US firm in is a prospect that also angered many Brits.
The brand-new nuclear-powered attack submarine HMS Astute, which has been described as “the most expensive and technologically advanced submarine in the world,” was on pre-delivery trials in Scotland when it ran painfully, publicly, aground on a shingle bank near the Isle of Skye during a crew change. To the rescue came the local Emergency Towing Vessel Anglian Prince (ironically, all four of the UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency-chartered ETVS are scheduled be scrubbed next year as part of the budget cuts). The big seagoing tug put a towline over to the ship and took a strain. The line parted and recoiled, missing the matelots (seamen) on the sub’s deck but wrapping itself around the sub’s sail, then fouling the Anglian Prince’s propeller. That pulled the two ships together, damaging a foreplane on the £1 billion submarine. The commercial tug Ayton Cross took over towing the sub while the Anglian Prince was towed to Ullapool for removal of the line.
A stray budgie landed on HMS Westminster and was quickly adopted by an eager crew. But the bird died of shock when an alarm went off. The little yellow and green bird was given a burial at sea “with full honors.”
White Fleets
Cruise ships are getting so big that passing under bridges can be a problem. Take the 138,000-ton Enchantment of the Seas. To the top of the mast is about 240 feet but the ship had to transit Denmark’s Storebaelt Bridge, whose air draft is only 213 feet. No problem! The ship and at least one fleetmate are designed with retractable exhaust pipes protruding from the funnels, and they were retracted. About 4,000 tons of water ballast were taken on, and the watermakers had worked overtime since departure. Lastly, the ship increased speed so as to cause squatting in the shallow water. The result was a fascinating and tense view for spectators but plenty of air-draft clearance for the ship.
The cruise ship Carnival Splendor had an after engine room explosion and fire (due to a cracked crankcase of one of six engines driving generators) while about 150 miles south of San Diego. The fire was quickly extinguished but the resulting damage left the ship with only auxiliary power. Close to 4,000 passengers had no air conditioning, toilets, or hot food, while food supplies were low because the ship had expected to arrive at San Diego within the day. The US Navy quickly loaded Carrier Onboard Delivery planes with groceries including boxes of crabmeat, croissants, and other delicacies for the stranded passengers. (However, one photo showed endless rows of Spam cans being loaded on a COD.) The goodies were flown out to the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and from there helicopters carried them to the ship. Meanwhile, two tugs towed the cruise liner to San Diego.
The Costa Atlantica had steering problems shortly after leaving Bermuda’s Dockyard and the pilot stopped the ship and called for two tugs. Engineers quickly fixed the problem and the ship headed for Port Canaveral. At the mouth of the Yangtze, the Costa Classica collided with the Belgian-flagged bulker Lowlands Longevity traveling in the same direction. Three of the 1,311 passengers were hospitalized and the cruise ship had a gash on its port side that was – how can we measure it? – eleven portholes long or maybe 80-90 feet long, and high enough to allow the curious plenty of room to look out and wonder at the damage.
Those That Go Back and Forth
In the Falkland war in 1982, the Brits chartered many commercial ships. Among those ships serving as troopships were the liner QE2 and the 27,000-ton ferry Norland. The Norland carried Royal Marines and other forces in San Carlos Sound, where the ship was under multiple attacks by Argentinean aircraft. Now, the 1974-built Norland and sister Norstar will be scrapped in India after many successful years of service.
In Scotland, the Hjaltland managed to dock at Rosyth a day late and more than 100 miles from its intended destination of Aberdeen. And across the North Sea, the Bergensfjord carrying 250 people from western Norway to Hirtshals in Denmark arrived three hours late but winds were too strong to allow it to dock so it spent hours idling in the harbor until the winds diminished a bit.
In Indonesian waters between the islands of Adonara Timur and Lembata, the wooden vessel Hasmita III (or maybe it was the Hastina III) capsized when hit by a 3-meter wave. Many people drowned but 21 were saved. (A later report said 70 were rescued.) Also in Indonesian waters but this time about 10 kilometers off the cape of Watumanuk on Flores Island, the ferry Tersanjung (or was it the Karya Pinang or the Karya Terang; reports vary?) sank because of rough weather. Local fishermen saved 44 but 22 went missing. As a casual footnote, the news report also noted that a small freighter (possibly the Karya Pinang mentioned above) with seven crew was reported as going down off Flores the same day. (Four of the crew were rescued.) A ferry with a listed capacity of 60 was carrying 220 when it sank near Ghoramara on Sundarbans Island in the eastern state of West Benegal. Dozens, many pilgrims returning from a Muslim religious event, went missing while more than 90 swam to safety.
A woman fell off a ferry as it approached Rosslare Harbor from Wales. She was rescued by the ferry’s rescue boat. In Scotland, a Dutchman fell off a ferry traveling from Tarbert to Ulg. Again the ferry’s rescue boat was quickly successful. But in spite of a fast (about five minutes) rescue by the ferry’s rescue boat and a nearby New York high-speed policeboat, a woman who jumped off the Staten Island ferry Guy V. Molinari was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
In Sydney Harbor, a speedboat carrying six became wedged under a ferryboat. Two occupants were thrown clear and one woman suffered a broken neck. The operator was charged with “culpably navigating in a dangerous manner so as to cause grievous bodily harm,” plus other charges.
The two ex-Hawaiian catamaran super ferries, repossessed by the Maritime Administration when the ferry line ran into political problems and ceased operations, were bought by MARAD for $25 million each at an auction. (The government was owed $135.7 million-plus.) The vessels are expected to end up in government service.
Legal Matters
A Detroit man, age 19, was sentenced to 18 months in jail, fined $100,000, and must pay $14,302 in restitution for making the Coast Guard respond to a hoax radio call.
A US firm owns and operates the 3,000-ton ice-breaking research vessel Laurence M. Gould in the Antarctic on behalf of the US Government. It must pay a $2.1 million fine for allowing crewmembers to knowingly discharge oily wastewater while en route to and from the Antarctic.
The Coast Guard found the Korean master of the 20,763-ton STX Daisy and another officer were drunk while transiting the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He served 14 days in jail and cannot sail in US waters for six months. (The news item made no mention as to what happened to the other officer. )
Nature
Large tabular ice floes are common in the Antarctic but are rarer at the northern end of the Earth. But an iceberg four times the size of Manhattan (about 1,700 acres) recently calved off one of Greenland’s two main glaciers and it will keep scientists and others busy for the next two years as it drifts into East Coast shipping lanes and toward offshore oil platforms. Perhaps paradoxically, the Newfoundland town of Twillingate, the Iceberg Capital of the World, is hurting because tourists did not show up to see icebergs floating past because none showed up this summer and a local businessman had to go to Labrador to get ice for his clients. Normally, the town of 3,000 people swells to 30,000 each summer.
Gamboling humpback whales, frolicking and breaching just outside and inside Sydney Harbor, delighted passengers on some Australian ferries. Several whales even ventured past the Opera House as far as the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
The US Congress passed the Coast Guard Authorization Act and that means that even double-hulled tankers will have to have two escorting tugs while transiting Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
Using financial assistance from the Port of Long Beach, Foss Maritime will convert one of its Dolphin-class tugs to hybrid propulsion. The Campbell Foss will join the Carolyn Dorothy, a Dolphin-class tug specifically built to be the world’s first hybrid tug.
Metal-Bashing
Shipbuilding in China can be unprofitable. About eighty shipyards were operating at a loss in 2006 and that number rose to more than 140 this year.
Three ship-scrappers were instantly killed in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Port when a steel plate dropped on them. A gusty wind played a role.
The US Government has ruled that all non-producing oil and gas wells (about 3,500) in the Gulf of Mexico must be permanently plugged and about 650 idle platforms must be removed. The cost to producers and explorers will range between $1.4 billion to $3.5 billion and some experts believe that plugging idle wells near active wells is unwise.
Austal Ltd received a US Navy contract to build two more Joint High Speed Vessels at its Mobile, Alabama facility. That makes five of the speedy catamarans on order in the $1.6 billion program, with options for five more. Five of the vessels will belong to the Army with the other five owned by the Marines. The Military Sealift Command will operate the vessels, with government-employee “civilian mariners” manning the first two and union members operating the next three in a shootout to see which kind of labor will operate the remaining vessels.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Since piracy is an international crime, any nation can capture a pirate and any nation can try him but it is proving hard to convict him. For example, a Kenyan court freed seventeen suspect Somali pirates, saying the US Navy hadn’t provided the necessary evidence. But the struggle went on. The sail yacht Choizil with three aboard was captured by Somalis but its South African skipper jumped overboard during a chase by naval forces and was picked up. Royal Thai navy ships saved twenty two crewmen and one Yemeni policeman after the Thai trawler Sirichai Nava 11 was sunk by the Somali pirates, who had captured it earlier. But survivors said one Thai and four of the Yemeni policemen hired to guard the FV were missing. The trawler was fired at and sunk in the night by an unidentified vessel.
Imports
At Tampa, authorities arrested three stowaways on a barge that had just arrived from Turks and Caicos and a fourth man leapt overboard. He was soon spotted and detained.
The destroyer HMS Manchester used darkness to hide its approach to smugglers off Columbia. The ship was within 150 meters off the stern of the smuggling vessel before the naval vessel was spotted. The cargo was about 240 kilos of cocaine street-worth £67.2 million.
Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
In the UK, about 200 people gathered to block access to the Devonport Dockyard at Plymouth in a protest of the UK’s Trident sea-launched nuclear-missile system and thirteen of the anti-nuclear demonstrators demonstrated their solidarity by supergluing their hands together.
Hope Cove is an extremely scenic seaside village located in a Devon cove and it has its own RIB rescue boat. The nearest RNLI rescue boat is stationed at Salcombe, some twenty minutes away at top speed, so the Hope Covers use their boat when needed. Several years ago, the locals took the boat out for a rescue although the Maritime and Coastguard Agency authorities had “grounded” the boat for a crack in the transom – the Agency deemed it “an unacceptable risk” and forbade further use of the RIB. Recently, however, the urge to help those in trouble predominated and the Hope Cove boat and its crew rescued a canoeist in trouble off Bolt Tail and brought him back to Hope Cove before the Salcombe fast inshore boat even got to Bolt Head. The bureaucratic MCA remains adamant in its position, however, even returning a donation of £3,600 for repairs of the Hope Cove boat.
How to interpret news items from other countries is sometimes tricky. Take this item from Belize (edited, shortened, and italicized): “The barge Benita caught fire on Ambergris Caye. The fire apparently started in the cabin section of the barge and quickly ran to the tank located on the bottom compartment. Just before the explosion, all three passengers managed to escape by jumping through the front glass window of the barge.”
Overworked Indian coastal police borrowed six speedboats from other police departments in order to improve security coverage for President Obama’s visit to Mumbai. Operating at speed at night, the Sagar Shakti ran into a ship that had been submerged for more than twenty years. On board was a phlegmatic deputy commissioner of police who later commented, “We noticed a hole in the bottom of the boat through which water had started entering.”
Monday, December 13, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Other Shores - November 2010
Charter rates for tankers will be so low in the fourth quarter that there will be “blood on the streets,” as one insider described the situation. Currently, rates are barely covering operating costs.
The operators of nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers have received at least 15 requests for icebreaker assistance on the Northern Sea Route next year. (Russia is trying hard to prove that merchant-ship transits of the route are both practical and economically viable.)
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Near Malta, what was described as the “Turkish goulette-type short-sea ferryboat” Fernandes hit the Marku Shoal and the master ran his leaking vessel aground on a nearby rocky shore. All 48 passengers and crew of six were removed safely, and salvage operations started. (The goulette or gulet is an extraordinarily handsome, traditional clipper-bowed, ketch-rigged craft originally used by Turkish fishermen or spongers and this one may have been in use as a cruise or excursion vessel.) Off Batangas in the Philippines, the cargo ship Hummer H1, carrying plywood, ran aground, opening cracks in both sides of the bow and damaging about 15,000 square meters of coral reef.
The cargo vessel Twisteden arrived at Duisburg with its wheelhouse crushed due to an allision with a bridge in Antwerp.
An explosion on the chemical tanker Gagasan Perak triggered an oil spill in Indonesia’s Sepanjang oilfield. The ship was being used to store crude oil.
In New Zealand, the coaster Spirit of Resolution was damaged by high seas when it tried to cross the Manukau Harbor bar. (Auckland has two harbors, the Waitemata on the north side of the city and accessible from the east, is used by most shipping, and the west-opening Manukau by coasting vessels.) It could move under its own power but had damaged steering. The tug Rupe headed north from New Playmouth and reached the damaged vessel the next day and started escorting it south for repairs. Off the Virginia coast, the tug Lucinda Smith was towing the 220-foot deck barge Dick Z when the tug crew noticed that the barge’s bow was flooding. The tug shifted to towing the barge by the stern and managed to anchor it, still afloat, in Hampton Roads. At India’s Jawaharial Nehru Port (India’s largest container port), two containers fell onto the tank tops of the container ship Lahore Express and punctured a fuel tank. The anti-pollution precautions taken soon after delayed about ten ships.
On the Houston Ship Channel, the scrap-loaded lead barge of a three-barge tow sliced into a high voltage transmission tower carrying multiple power lines across the Channel. Luckily the power was off for maintenance and the tower ended up being supported by the barge until the barge-carried derrick Big John could take over. Ironically, a major electrical power company owns the barges and the towboat is named the Safety Quest. Un-ironically, the three-day closure of the Channel kept about seventy ships from their business and cost the region about $1 billion. In North Devon, high winds broke the (apparently unused) suction dredger Severn Sands free of its mooring and it sailed into the River Taw, grounded, then floated free on a very high tide, and was carried upriver toward Barnstaple. It was finally beached at Fremington Quay, and officials and many others breathed easier.
Twelve people, mostly port officials and dockworkers, were treated at Abu Dhabi after being affected by gas fumes from a berthed tugboat at Mina Zayed. The tug had been there for about a year. In the UK, routine testing of the anchored tanker British Cormorant’s rescue boat got a visit from Captain Murphy when a line snapped and six crewmen were dumped into the water. A Coastguard rescue helicopter rescued them and took one with spinal injuries to a hospital. And during routine maintenance, a lifeboat fell onboard the cargo ship Belorus while in Turkey’s Aliagra Anchorage. Two crewmen were seriously injured, one dying later in a hospital. At a Korean-owned shipyard in the Philippines, an injured shipyard worker died on the way to a hospital. No mention as to what happened.
At Gig Harbor in the State of Washington, a worker fell off a barge while working on a sewer outfall and went under the barge un-noticed. He was spotted when he emerged at the other end, unconscious and purple. CPR resuscitated him and he was discharged from a local hospital three days later. A crewman on the 580-foot bulker BK Champ injured his hand and an Alaskan-based Cost Guard helicopter plucked him off the ship about 30 miles south of Adak. This seemingly simple mission required three MH-60 helicopters and one HC-130 aircraft and they flew over 1,800 miles.
Gray Fleets
Great Britain is so short of workers with shipbuilding skills that Polish welders are being hired to build the two aircraft carriers that the UK has under construction (at least until the next Defense Plan is released). Many of the foreigners learned their skills building Soviet submarines. It probably helps the Exchequer or the contractors’ profit lines that they are willing to accept wages that are nearly half that of their British equivalents.
While training at night with the US Coast Guard Cutter Frank Drew, a coastguardsman fell off a small boat. His body was found the next day.
For several years now, the thick anechoic coating on several Virginia-class subs has been peeling off in patches that sometimes measure hundreds of square feet. The US Navy is investigating why the sound-absorbent stuff has been causing “fail-to-sail” problems; particularly affected has been the USS Texas.
The US Navy stopped or limited operations of at least ten Cyclone-class coastal patrol boats after finding structural damage. The boats are essentially past their expected lifespan of fifteen years and have seen hard service chasing pirates and drug-smugglers.
The boom of a commercial crane fell across the aft section of the guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey at the Norfolk Naval Station. High winds apparently blew the boom over. Some damage to the warship but nobody hurt.
The commanding officer of the Indian Kilo-class submarine INS Sindhurakshak has had three accidents (in the language of an Indian news report: ”hitting a sand dune, entangling with a fishing boat, and hitting the submarine into a jetty”). A Court of Inquiry found him guilty of all three charges and he was, in the language of the news item, “set aside.
The French Navy does not have a need for such an offshore patrol vessel and is uncertain about the legalities but it has agreed to man the Hermes, a Gowind-class OPV built and owned by a French shipyard that hopes to get foreign orders for such vessels. The Navy crew would be onboard for up to three years.
During a search for the small boat My Business, a Venezuelan navy helicopter crashed into the Bolivian Navy research vessel Vo-11 and five were injured while two others went missing. Many of those involved in the crash were medical personnel who had treated people rescued from two motorboats the day before.
Russia will test its new Buluva intercontinental ballistic, sea-launched missile three more times. Failures will mean drastic changes in “the whole production and control system.” To date, only five of twelve test firings have been successful.
White Fleets
The 1975-built German cruise ship Delphin did not make a scheduled cruise to the Black Sea. The question was whether that was due to a ”technical defect,” as the charterer claimed, or the arrest by a French court due to claims for unpaid charter payments. In any case, up to 700 ticket-holders did not travel to the Black Sea.
The Oasis of the Seas was about to depart from Port Everglades when somebody spotted a Florida burrowing owl (a bird of special environmental concern) that had made a home in the ship’s mini-golf course on the upper deck. Wildlife personnel safely removed the pint-sized bird and released it somewhere more suitable.
Starting next year, larger cruise ships may be banned from the Antarctic. Smaller cruise ships must not use heavy fuel oil (due to its potential for devastating pollution in case of a spill) but can land up to 100 passengers at a time while larger ships must not offload any passengers.
A rumpus on the liner QM2 caused a couple to be ordered ashore, possibly in a remote part of Quebec. Fellow passengers interceded and the Commodore changed the marooning sentence to one requiring the pair to stay in their cabin under house arrest for the six remaining days of their £12,000 cruise plus turning over all their liquor. She is 82, Jewish and a successful Broadway play producer while he is 91, owns a chain of art cinemas, produced a porn film, and claims to be the illegitimate son of the Duke of Winsor (yep, he who could have been King Edward VIII but abdicated instead). The cause of the rumpus seems to have been a remark she overheard from a nearby dining room table that there were too many Jews on board. She stood up and responded with vigor and profanity before storming off to their stateroom. Next day, she refused to apologize for the vulgarity of her language. She later dramatically claimed that the episode has “ruined our lives. It has changed us forever.”
Computation sometimes makes modern ships difficult to operate smoothly. Take, for example, the up-to-date, all-suites Great Lakes cruise ship Clelia II. Recently, it lost power and grounded while on passage through the North Channel towards Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. It dropped an anchor, and soon was able to resume its voyage. Just out of the port, it lost power again and dropped that anchor again. It soon resumed steaming but power again disappeared. It was dragging both anchors as it tried to avoid plowing into a marina and took out one channel marker before it was able to back off. A tug soon appeared and took charge of the bewildered ship. Onlookers reported that there was a large boom like an earthquake when it hit the shore somewhere in its wild journey.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Fatigued by playing at a recent concert, a dozing Taiwanese violinist on a Hong Kong Star ferry failed to notice when somebody swiped his violin. It was made in 1838 and was worth more than $350,000. Closed-circuit TV helped authorities track down the robber. He said he thought the violin was worth maybe $20 and was fined 2,000 Hong Kong dollars (about US$257).
The smallish but government-owned Newfoundland ferry Marine Voyager struck a small (6 meter) anchored fishing boat off Burgeo on Newfoundland’s south coast whose occupant was fishing for cod. The ferry had just left the government wharf at Burgeo and continued on after striking the FV. The fisherman said he saw nobody in the wheelhouse or on deck. No injuries, some righteous indignation, and a protest to authorities.
In remote northeastern Brazil, a small and overloaded ferry capsized and ten children died. Seven adults, however, survived. On the Greek holiday island of Kos, the catamaran ferry Aegean Cat came into its dock too fast, and hit it twice. About 25 British tourists (out of 213 aboard) were injured, five seriously, with one female breaking a leg. In Nova Scotia at the ferry terminal at North Sydney, cocaine was found in a backpack and a man was arrested before he could board the ferry to Newfoundland. Street value of the white power was at least $1.5 million. In New York Harbor, a suicidal woman jumped off the ferry Andrew J. Barberi while it was passing the Statue of Liberty. Three harbor policemen rescued her within two minutes. Thirteen Sudanese traveling to mourn the 37 victims of a collision of two buses (one had rushed past a truck but smashed into an oncoming minibus, setting it on fire and killing four children) were themselves victims of a ferry capsize on the White Nile near Alrader. Nine others survived. At Genoa, two young German tourists were driving their car off the ferry Moby Otta when it moved and their car dropped into the water. They drowned.
At Auckland, New Zealand, alcohol played some kind of role when the ferry Quickcat, traveling at about 20 knots, sucked a 7.5-meter motor launch between its hulls, capsizing the smaller boat and putting two boaters in the water. The launch’s operator was asked if he had been drinking and tersely replied, “I have no comment on anything.” A police spokeswoman noted that there was no law against operating a vessel under the influence of alcohol but the ferry crew was breath-tested anyways. (Is there a conflict between police policy and the regulations of Maritime New Zealand?)
Legal Matters
Usually, US Federal courts go after the chief engineer and the shipping company when the crime is use of a ‘magic pipe” and/or improper logging of a watery-oil separator usage. But a recent case added a classification-society surveyor because he had certified that the pollution-prevention equipment on the landing craft Island Express I was adequate although the separator was actually broken. Everyone was found guilty and will be sentenced in December.
The master of the oil tanker Kashmir was found guilty of unintentionally destroying property after the ship struck the anchored container ship Sima Bay at Dubai last February, causing a major fire. He was fined Dh30,000 (about US$8,000).
A pilot took the tanker Noord Fast into the Fawley Refinery at Southampton in the UK while the master was down below, prematurely celebrating a scheduled return to his homeland. On the master’s return to the wheelhouse after the ship was moored, he was “unsteady on his feet” and had “glazed eyes” so the pilot contacted police. In court, the master pleaded guilty to being in charge of a vessel (even though it was moored) while drunk and was fined £1,700.
Migrants and Other Imports
Near Montreal, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police opened a shipping container and found it packed to the roof with cardboard boxes containing seven tons of hash. “It’s black and compact like Plasticine,” said one official. The hash may have originated in Pakistan.
Nature
The 620-foot German-flagged container ship Northern Vitality arrived at San Francisco with a dead minke whale draped across its bow but was unaware of its presence until a greeting tugboat notified the ship. The whale was still in position when the ship docked at berth 57 at Oakland. Judging by its swollen body (visible in photos), the whale had been dead for some time, and its head and fins were missing, perhaps eaten off by sharks.
In Scotland, Greenpeacers protesting deep-water drilling managed to attach a specially built pod to the anchor chain of the 700-foot drill ship Stena Carron and several lived in it for several days until police said ‘enough of this nonsense’ and ousted them.
Metal Bashing
Reefers – those ships whose holds are large refrigerators – are on the way out and are being replaced by refrigerated containers. The world fleet of reefers now numbers 778 and is expected to shrink to 450 by 2020. Of hundreds of ships on order, only eight reefers are being built.
The Royal Navy must eventually replace its Type 22 and 23 frigates and the replacements will be called the Type 26. A British defense contractor wants the Brazilian military to co-design the Type 26, a move that is OK with the British Government since it recently signed a pledge of military cooperation with Brazil. Other countries, such as India, may also be asked to become co-designers.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Tanzania has a navy (seven fast attack craft and twelve patrol boats) and its sailors are not afraid to fight. Somewhere in the general vicinity of the energy-exploration vessel Ophir Energy, Somali pirates opened fire on an un-specified Tanzanian warship, hitting it at least fifty times. The warship returned fire and eventually captured a pirate. The baddies may have planned to kidnap workers from the Ophir Energy and hold them for ransom.
Somali pirates captured the Greek-operated cargo ship Lugela but the crew had fortified themselves in a citadel and would not allow the pirates to control the ship. Two days later, the frustrated pirates left the ship.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
Many inland vessels in Europe carry the owner’s car on the afterdeck. At Rotterdam, a Volvo station wagon became a CTL (constructive total loss) when it fell while the vessel’s crane was swinging it over another vessel to the wharf.
For some years, the specialized bulker 150-000-ton Taharoa Express, built in 1999, has been loading a pumped slurry of concentrated ironsand (titanomagnetite) from a New Zealand beach, and drying it on the subsequent voyage to China and Japan, where the cargo is unloaded conventionally and used to make steel. The ship is nearing the end of a contract (and its service life—it has had corrosion problems in recent months that seriously threatened its stability and worried maritime officials) so a Japanese shipping company is having a new slurry tanker built. That may mean the contract will be extended for another 15 years.
What is probably the world’s oldest complete steamship will go on exhibit at the Thames port of Tilsbury. The 1890-built Robin will sit on a “bespoke special floating dock” (read that as a “barge”). The oldie was recently and thoroughly conserved to the tune of £1.9 million (about $2.9 million).
A German firm has developed a propeller that can adjust its pitch without mechanical components. Carbon-fiber plastic blades are attached to a metal hub and they flex according to the load and rpms. A propeller can handle up to 3,500 bhp and ten sets have been ordered for use on ten patrol boats for the Dutch Water Management.
Because a tugboat had run into Wat Ka Rong’s floating market in Thailand, it broke adrift. It then sank about twenty small boats and slightly injured several people while running amok. The floating market is about 100 meters long and can support about 200 shoppers and merchants. Police filed charges of reckless driving.
The operators of nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers have received at least 15 requests for icebreaker assistance on the Northern Sea Route next year. (Russia is trying hard to prove that merchant-ship transits of the route are both practical and economically viable.)
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Near Malta, what was described as the “Turkish goulette-type short-sea ferryboat” Fernandes hit the Marku Shoal and the master ran his leaking vessel aground on a nearby rocky shore. All 48 passengers and crew of six were removed safely, and salvage operations started. (The goulette or gulet is an extraordinarily handsome, traditional clipper-bowed, ketch-rigged craft originally used by Turkish fishermen or spongers and this one may have been in use as a cruise or excursion vessel.) Off Batangas in the Philippines, the cargo ship Hummer H1, carrying plywood, ran aground, opening cracks in both sides of the bow and damaging about 15,000 square meters of coral reef.
The cargo vessel Twisteden arrived at Duisburg with its wheelhouse crushed due to an allision with a bridge in Antwerp.
An explosion on the chemical tanker Gagasan Perak triggered an oil spill in Indonesia’s Sepanjang oilfield. The ship was being used to store crude oil.
In New Zealand, the coaster Spirit of Resolution was damaged by high seas when it tried to cross the Manukau Harbor bar. (Auckland has two harbors, the Waitemata on the north side of the city and accessible from the east, is used by most shipping, and the west-opening Manukau by coasting vessels.) It could move under its own power but had damaged steering. The tug Rupe headed north from New Playmouth and reached the damaged vessel the next day and started escorting it south for repairs. Off the Virginia coast, the tug Lucinda Smith was towing the 220-foot deck barge Dick Z when the tug crew noticed that the barge’s bow was flooding. The tug shifted to towing the barge by the stern and managed to anchor it, still afloat, in Hampton Roads. At India’s Jawaharial Nehru Port (India’s largest container port), two containers fell onto the tank tops of the container ship Lahore Express and punctured a fuel tank. The anti-pollution precautions taken soon after delayed about ten ships.
On the Houston Ship Channel, the scrap-loaded lead barge of a three-barge tow sliced into a high voltage transmission tower carrying multiple power lines across the Channel. Luckily the power was off for maintenance and the tower ended up being supported by the barge until the barge-carried derrick Big John could take over. Ironically, a major electrical power company owns the barges and the towboat is named the Safety Quest. Un-ironically, the three-day closure of the Channel kept about seventy ships from their business and cost the region about $1 billion. In North Devon, high winds broke the (apparently unused) suction dredger Severn Sands free of its mooring and it sailed into the River Taw, grounded, then floated free on a very high tide, and was carried upriver toward Barnstaple. It was finally beached at Fremington Quay, and officials and many others breathed easier.
Twelve people, mostly port officials and dockworkers, were treated at Abu Dhabi after being affected by gas fumes from a berthed tugboat at Mina Zayed. The tug had been there for about a year. In the UK, routine testing of the anchored tanker British Cormorant’s rescue boat got a visit from Captain Murphy when a line snapped and six crewmen were dumped into the water. A Coastguard rescue helicopter rescued them and took one with spinal injuries to a hospital. And during routine maintenance, a lifeboat fell onboard the cargo ship Belorus while in Turkey’s Aliagra Anchorage. Two crewmen were seriously injured, one dying later in a hospital. At a Korean-owned shipyard in the Philippines, an injured shipyard worker died on the way to a hospital. No mention as to what happened.
At Gig Harbor in the State of Washington, a worker fell off a barge while working on a sewer outfall and went under the barge un-noticed. He was spotted when he emerged at the other end, unconscious and purple. CPR resuscitated him and he was discharged from a local hospital three days later. A crewman on the 580-foot bulker BK Champ injured his hand and an Alaskan-based Cost Guard helicopter plucked him off the ship about 30 miles south of Adak. This seemingly simple mission required three MH-60 helicopters and one HC-130 aircraft and they flew over 1,800 miles.
Gray Fleets
Great Britain is so short of workers with shipbuilding skills that Polish welders are being hired to build the two aircraft carriers that the UK has under construction (at least until the next Defense Plan is released). Many of the foreigners learned their skills building Soviet submarines. It probably helps the Exchequer or the contractors’ profit lines that they are willing to accept wages that are nearly half that of their British equivalents.
While training at night with the US Coast Guard Cutter Frank Drew, a coastguardsman fell off a small boat. His body was found the next day.
For several years now, the thick anechoic coating on several Virginia-class subs has been peeling off in patches that sometimes measure hundreds of square feet. The US Navy is investigating why the sound-absorbent stuff has been causing “fail-to-sail” problems; particularly affected has been the USS Texas.
The US Navy stopped or limited operations of at least ten Cyclone-class coastal patrol boats after finding structural damage. The boats are essentially past their expected lifespan of fifteen years and have seen hard service chasing pirates and drug-smugglers.
The boom of a commercial crane fell across the aft section of the guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey at the Norfolk Naval Station. High winds apparently blew the boom over. Some damage to the warship but nobody hurt.
The commanding officer of the Indian Kilo-class submarine INS Sindhurakshak has had three accidents (in the language of an Indian news report: ”hitting a sand dune, entangling with a fishing boat, and hitting the submarine into a jetty”). A Court of Inquiry found him guilty of all three charges and he was, in the language of the news item, “set aside.
The French Navy does not have a need for such an offshore patrol vessel and is uncertain about the legalities but it has agreed to man the Hermes, a Gowind-class OPV built and owned by a French shipyard that hopes to get foreign orders for such vessels. The Navy crew would be onboard for up to three years.
During a search for the small boat My Business, a Venezuelan navy helicopter crashed into the Bolivian Navy research vessel Vo-11 and five were injured while two others went missing. Many of those involved in the crash were medical personnel who had treated people rescued from two motorboats the day before.
Russia will test its new Buluva intercontinental ballistic, sea-launched missile three more times. Failures will mean drastic changes in “the whole production and control system.” To date, only five of twelve test firings have been successful.
White Fleets
The 1975-built German cruise ship Delphin did not make a scheduled cruise to the Black Sea. The question was whether that was due to a ”technical defect,” as the charterer claimed, or the arrest by a French court due to claims for unpaid charter payments. In any case, up to 700 ticket-holders did not travel to the Black Sea.
The Oasis of the Seas was about to depart from Port Everglades when somebody spotted a Florida burrowing owl (a bird of special environmental concern) that had made a home in the ship’s mini-golf course on the upper deck. Wildlife personnel safely removed the pint-sized bird and released it somewhere more suitable.
Starting next year, larger cruise ships may be banned from the Antarctic. Smaller cruise ships must not use heavy fuel oil (due to its potential for devastating pollution in case of a spill) but can land up to 100 passengers at a time while larger ships must not offload any passengers.
A rumpus on the liner QM2 caused a couple to be ordered ashore, possibly in a remote part of Quebec. Fellow passengers interceded and the Commodore changed the marooning sentence to one requiring the pair to stay in their cabin under house arrest for the six remaining days of their £12,000 cruise plus turning over all their liquor. She is 82, Jewish and a successful Broadway play producer while he is 91, owns a chain of art cinemas, produced a porn film, and claims to be the illegitimate son of the Duke of Winsor (yep, he who could have been King Edward VIII but abdicated instead). The cause of the rumpus seems to have been a remark she overheard from a nearby dining room table that there were too many Jews on board. She stood up and responded with vigor and profanity before storming off to their stateroom. Next day, she refused to apologize for the vulgarity of her language. She later dramatically claimed that the episode has “ruined our lives. It has changed us forever.”
Computation sometimes makes modern ships difficult to operate smoothly. Take, for example, the up-to-date, all-suites Great Lakes cruise ship Clelia II. Recently, it lost power and grounded while on passage through the North Channel towards Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. It dropped an anchor, and soon was able to resume its voyage. Just out of the port, it lost power again and dropped that anchor again. It soon resumed steaming but power again disappeared. It was dragging both anchors as it tried to avoid plowing into a marina and took out one channel marker before it was able to back off. A tug soon appeared and took charge of the bewildered ship. Onlookers reported that there was a large boom like an earthquake when it hit the shore somewhere in its wild journey.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Fatigued by playing at a recent concert, a dozing Taiwanese violinist on a Hong Kong Star ferry failed to notice when somebody swiped his violin. It was made in 1838 and was worth more than $350,000. Closed-circuit TV helped authorities track down the robber. He said he thought the violin was worth maybe $20 and was fined 2,000 Hong Kong dollars (about US$257).
The smallish but government-owned Newfoundland ferry Marine Voyager struck a small (6 meter) anchored fishing boat off Burgeo on Newfoundland’s south coast whose occupant was fishing for cod. The ferry had just left the government wharf at Burgeo and continued on after striking the FV. The fisherman said he saw nobody in the wheelhouse or on deck. No injuries, some righteous indignation, and a protest to authorities.
In remote northeastern Brazil, a small and overloaded ferry capsized and ten children died. Seven adults, however, survived. On the Greek holiday island of Kos, the catamaran ferry Aegean Cat came into its dock too fast, and hit it twice. About 25 British tourists (out of 213 aboard) were injured, five seriously, with one female breaking a leg. In Nova Scotia at the ferry terminal at North Sydney, cocaine was found in a backpack and a man was arrested before he could board the ferry to Newfoundland. Street value of the white power was at least $1.5 million. In New York Harbor, a suicidal woman jumped off the ferry Andrew J. Barberi while it was passing the Statue of Liberty. Three harbor policemen rescued her within two minutes. Thirteen Sudanese traveling to mourn the 37 victims of a collision of two buses (one had rushed past a truck but smashed into an oncoming minibus, setting it on fire and killing four children) were themselves victims of a ferry capsize on the White Nile near Alrader. Nine others survived. At Genoa, two young German tourists were driving their car off the ferry Moby Otta when it moved and their car dropped into the water. They drowned.
At Auckland, New Zealand, alcohol played some kind of role when the ferry Quickcat, traveling at about 20 knots, sucked a 7.5-meter motor launch between its hulls, capsizing the smaller boat and putting two boaters in the water. The launch’s operator was asked if he had been drinking and tersely replied, “I have no comment on anything.” A police spokeswoman noted that there was no law against operating a vessel under the influence of alcohol but the ferry crew was breath-tested anyways. (Is there a conflict between police policy and the regulations of Maritime New Zealand?)
Legal Matters
Usually, US Federal courts go after the chief engineer and the shipping company when the crime is use of a ‘magic pipe” and/or improper logging of a watery-oil separator usage. But a recent case added a classification-society surveyor because he had certified that the pollution-prevention equipment on the landing craft Island Express I was adequate although the separator was actually broken. Everyone was found guilty and will be sentenced in December.
The master of the oil tanker Kashmir was found guilty of unintentionally destroying property after the ship struck the anchored container ship Sima Bay at Dubai last February, causing a major fire. He was fined Dh30,000 (about US$8,000).
A pilot took the tanker Noord Fast into the Fawley Refinery at Southampton in the UK while the master was down below, prematurely celebrating a scheduled return to his homeland. On the master’s return to the wheelhouse after the ship was moored, he was “unsteady on his feet” and had “glazed eyes” so the pilot contacted police. In court, the master pleaded guilty to being in charge of a vessel (even though it was moored) while drunk and was fined £1,700.
Migrants and Other Imports
Near Montreal, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police opened a shipping container and found it packed to the roof with cardboard boxes containing seven tons of hash. “It’s black and compact like Plasticine,” said one official. The hash may have originated in Pakistan.
Nature
The 620-foot German-flagged container ship Northern Vitality arrived at San Francisco with a dead minke whale draped across its bow but was unaware of its presence until a greeting tugboat notified the ship. The whale was still in position when the ship docked at berth 57 at Oakland. Judging by its swollen body (visible in photos), the whale had been dead for some time, and its head and fins were missing, perhaps eaten off by sharks.
In Scotland, Greenpeacers protesting deep-water drilling managed to attach a specially built pod to the anchor chain of the 700-foot drill ship Stena Carron and several lived in it for several days until police said ‘enough of this nonsense’ and ousted them.
Metal Bashing
Reefers – those ships whose holds are large refrigerators – are on the way out and are being replaced by refrigerated containers. The world fleet of reefers now numbers 778 and is expected to shrink to 450 by 2020. Of hundreds of ships on order, only eight reefers are being built.
The Royal Navy must eventually replace its Type 22 and 23 frigates and the replacements will be called the Type 26. A British defense contractor wants the Brazilian military to co-design the Type 26, a move that is OK with the British Government since it recently signed a pledge of military cooperation with Brazil. Other countries, such as India, may also be asked to become co-designers.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Tanzania has a navy (seven fast attack craft and twelve patrol boats) and its sailors are not afraid to fight. Somewhere in the general vicinity of the energy-exploration vessel Ophir Energy, Somali pirates opened fire on an un-specified Tanzanian warship, hitting it at least fifty times. The warship returned fire and eventually captured a pirate. The baddies may have planned to kidnap workers from the Ophir Energy and hold them for ransom.
Somali pirates captured the Greek-operated cargo ship Lugela but the crew had fortified themselves in a citadel and would not allow the pirates to control the ship. Two days later, the frustrated pirates left the ship.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
Many inland vessels in Europe carry the owner’s car on the afterdeck. At Rotterdam, a Volvo station wagon became a CTL (constructive total loss) when it fell while the vessel’s crane was swinging it over another vessel to the wharf.
For some years, the specialized bulker 150-000-ton Taharoa Express, built in 1999, has been loading a pumped slurry of concentrated ironsand (titanomagnetite) from a New Zealand beach, and drying it on the subsequent voyage to China and Japan, where the cargo is unloaded conventionally and used to make steel. The ship is nearing the end of a contract (and its service life—it has had corrosion problems in recent months that seriously threatened its stability and worried maritime officials) so a Japanese shipping company is having a new slurry tanker built. That may mean the contract will be extended for another 15 years.
What is probably the world’s oldest complete steamship will go on exhibit at the Thames port of Tilsbury. The 1890-built Robin will sit on a “bespoke special floating dock” (read that as a “barge”). The oldie was recently and thoroughly conserved to the tune of £1.9 million (about $2.9 million).
A German firm has developed a propeller that can adjust its pitch without mechanical components. Carbon-fiber plastic blades are attached to a metal hub and they flex according to the load and rpms. A propeller can handle up to 3,500 bhp and ten sets have been ordered for use on ten patrol boats for the Dutch Water Management.
Because a tugboat had run into Wat Ka Rong’s floating market in Thailand, it broke adrift. It then sank about twenty small boats and slightly injured several people while running amok. The floating market is about 100 meters long and can support about 200 shoppers and merchants. Police filed charges of reckless driving.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Other Shores - October 2010
Photos in daily shipping news publications show many container ships filled to capacity. But sometimes, a fully loaded ship is high out of the water. Is this due to a low level of bunkers at the end of a long voyage or are many of the containers empties? One wonders.
Due to the world’s economic situation and declining sea trade, orders for new ships declined last year but ship deliveries grew to 75.7 million gross tons compared to 64.2 million gross tons on 2008.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
At Constanza, the container ship Medy loaded scrap (in containers?) and sailed for Turkey. Shortly afterwards, it called for help and a Romanian rescue vessel took the crew of 17 off the badly listing vessel. Soon afterward, the Medy sank. Off Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan, the dredger Anabar ran onto rocks while outside a port and one of a crew of twenty went missing. In Russia’s Laptev Sea in the Arctic region, the tugboat Alexel Kulakovsky sank and a nearby tanker could find only the captain and two sailors. A prolonged search failed to find any bodies but did spot an empty liferaft. Off the west coast of South Korea, the South Korean cargo ship Ocean Ace No. 6 ran down an anonymous Chinese fishing boat and all its crew died.
In China in an area east of Changbai, the product tanker Jin He ran aground near the harbor entrance. The next high tide straightened up the listing vessel and local tugs managed to free it. At Kavaratti Island in Lakshadweep, the cement-carrying freighter Nand Aparajita ended up perched on a coral reef. The reef is among the finest in India. In American Samoa, the tourist submarine Atlantis V went aground in Apra Harbor. No tourists were on board and a tug freed the sub later that day. The fishing boat-refueling tanker Hai Soon 5 ran aground on the western reef off Bipi Island, Manus Province, and Papua New Guinea officials said it was fully loaded. The combined chemical and oil tanker Clipper Tobago ran aground off Guatemala. The ship was on passa ge from Houston to Santo Tomas di Castilla with a cargo of tallow and catering greases. (Extensive research failed to find a definition for the last but it may be the greases that accumulate in restaurant grease traps or used deep-fat frying oils.)
The in-ballast Belgian VLCC Flandre collided with the far-smaller coastal bulker Hua Chi 8 off the coast of China’s Zhejiang province, and the big one won. Six mariners died. Somewhere above the Russian landmass in difficult ice conditions and poor visibility, the Russian tankers Indiga and Varzuga collided in that nation’s North East Passage. Some hull damage resulted but no spill of its cargo (diesel oil) or bunkers. Both vessels resumed steaming for Chukota in the Far East.
Ghanaian authorities ordered that the product tanker Seven Seas be beached after it collided with a Cambodian cargo ship. Locals decided to vandalize the ship and about 200 were present while fuel was being siphoned off. Four were killed and another 70 injured when there was an explosion. Explosion and fire on the Vermillion Oil Platform No. 380 some 90 miles south of the Louisiana coast forced 13 workers into the water. Twelve of the well-trained men were spotted in life preservers and clipped together for maximum visibility for searchers. They were supporting a thirteenth man without a preserver. The platform only produces gas and oil and there was no spill.
The chief engineer of the bulk carrier Almeda died from drinking industrial alcohol while the ship was sailing to the Red Sea’s Port Sudan. An explosion at an east China shipyard killed five and left one worker missing.
A sick 3-year-old boy was airlifted from the ferry Stena Europe while it was 13 miles from Stumble Head on the west coast of Wales. Not far away, a lifeboat was taking a sick seaman to a hospital from the merchant vessel Marida Melissa. The lifeboat was used because the local RAF rescue helicopter was busy transporting the little boy.
Gray Fleets
The nearly new destroyer HMS Daring suffered a long dent when its escorting tug Svitzer Sussex lost power and steering control and they collided. The tug, protected by much rubber fendering, was unharmed.
The Royal Navy will scrap the icebreaker HMS Endurance and replace it with a leased or purchased Norwegian icebreaker, and it may receive the same name. The Endurance nearly sank when someone improperly opened an engineroom valve during maintenance while the ship was off the coast of Chile and that caused £30 million of damages. The icebreaker is a key contributor to Royal Navy presence in the South Atlantic.
The Canadian Navy may pare down the number of ships or reduce the capability of its Arctic/Offshore Patrol Ship program due to strict budget constraints on the CAD3.1 billion (USD2.9 billion) program. Measures included reducing the caliber of the main gun from 76 mm or 57 mm to 25 mm, using less-powerful engines, and only building six hulls instead of the "six to eight" specified previously.
The president of Ghana wanted “big” ships for that nation’s navy so he bought two elderly East German fast patrol craft that had been built in the late Seventies and retired in 2005. He paid a staggering $38 million, $23 million for the boats and another $15 million for refurbishment. (Tunisia purchased six of the better boats, two were sold to private parties, and the last two will be scrapped.)
In recent months, British subs have had frequent encounters with Russian attack subs and there seems to be only one reasonable answer to the sudden popularity of the Brit subs. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian Navy has put submarines on patrol so infrequently that officials must have suddenly realized that its library of vessel and other marine sounds is obsolete and needed refreshing. One may surmise that submarines of other nations are also being dogged, but the Yanks, French, and Chinese aren’t talking.
A New Jersey salvage company will recover the remains of USS Scorpion, Commodore Joshua Barney’s flagship of a small fleet of shallow-draft warships in the War of 1812. At the abortive Battle of Bladensburg , his ships and marines were far more effective than the US land forces in attempting to slow British forces advancing on Washington, DC. In the end, Barney was forced to scuttle his flotilla way up the Patuxent River at Pig Point and surrender. He was promptly paroled by the British commander, who had recognized his dogged gallantry.
The executive officer of the Indian Navy submarine INS Shankush lost his life about 60 miles off Mumbia when a wave swept him off the sub’s deck while he and five others were trying to rescue a maintenance worker who had fallen into the sea.
White Fleets
In Canada’s far north some 55 miles from Kugluktuk (aka Coppermine), the cruise ship Clipper Adventure ended up on some rocks and the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen was sent to take off the 110 passengers and 69 crewmembers.
The Explorer of the Seas (3,100 passengers) and the smaller Independence (100 passengers) sought refuge from Hurricane Earl at Portland, Maine. Passengers on the first vessel reported it had steamed for Portland at its top cruising speed of 23 knots and it had been too windy to stand on deck. (The hurricane’s impact on Portland was minimal but offshore waves were reported to be 15 -25 feet.)
In Russia, the river cruise vessel Viking Kirov hit a barge while on a cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. None of the nearly 300 passengers on the American-operated vessel were hurt and alcohol was mentioned as a possible contributor to the excitement.
A 72 year-old woman with head injuries was heli-lifted off the Island Princess 63 miles from Yakutat in Alaska.
Some junior crewmembers of some cruise ships are into child porn. Convicted in May was an assistant waiter on the Costa Atlantica and an assistant room steward on the Carnival Glory was recently arrested at Halifax.
Sixteen Brits are suing a cruise company because the Alexy Maryshev was too close to a glacier when it calved in 2007. Most of the 48 passengers were on the foredeck to get good close-up photos of the glacier and many were hurt, some seriously, by falling chunks of ice and violent wave motions induced by the calving. The cruise ship was originally an ice-strengthened research vessel.
They That Go Back and Forth
The operator of a Le Havre-Portsmouth ferry line substituted the ferry Cote d’Albatre on that route after the high-speed catamaran ro/ro Norman Arrow struck a mooring buoy at Le Havre and holed itself below the waterline
Five people were injured at Mayne Island when the British Columbia ferry Queen of Nanaimo made a very hard landing even though an anchor had been dropped. One passenger was airlifted to a hospital.
The State of North Carolina hired a retired Coast Guardsman to head up its ferry division. Within two months he reported nepotism, payroll padding, and out-of-control spending and he was promptly fired for not being a team player. But his reports triggered investigations that showed he was right – among other things, a list of ferry employees showed many repeats of the same surnames.
In central Manitoba on the Bloodvein River, a probably intoxicated young man threatened to jump into the river so the ferry returned to the dock. There, two Mounties attempted to speak to the youth. He backed away, then jumped off the ferry. One Mountie felt he had to jump in to save the teenager, who appeared to be sinking. In full accordance with ancient traditions of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mountie got his man!
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a river ferry caught fire while on the Kasai River, a tributary of the Congo River. Only fifteen people made it to shore and some 200 others died. Meanwhile in the same country, a fishing vessel capsized and 24 (according to the government) or 60 (reports from locals) people died.
Legal Matters
Usually the US government wins when it comes to prosecutions involving oily water separators, ”magic pipes,” and erring logbooks but a jury recently acquitted the chief engineer of the tanker Georgios M of five such charges. Earlier, his employer had paid a $1.3 million fine and cooperated with the prosecutors in their assault on the chief. Now he’s suing his employer and the tanker for $22.8 million for their complicity in his 28-month incarceration in Texas. However, the US government won in the case against the chief engineer of the bulker New Fortune for a “magic pipe” violation. His punishment was surprisingly mild: he got three years of probation, a $5,000 fine, and a $100 special assessment for failing to maintain an oil record book. The Greek owners paid a $750,000 fine and a community service payment of $100,000.
The Ukrainian master of the Dutch coaster Flinterforest was drunk (at least twice the legal limit) when he ran his ship aground in the Orestund strait that separates Sweden and Denmark. A Malmo court let him off with a sentence of the 17 days of time he had already served but his career was probably finished. And in Wellington, New Zealand, a cargo ship failed to sail because its master was too drunk. The harbormaster described him as, “I understand he was conscious but not feeling well.” The owners flew a new skipper from Japan. Authorities would not release the ship’s name but a news account at its next port revealed that it was the Tasman Pathfinder.
Waterfront workers in the US must possess a TWIC (Transportation Worker Identification Credential) card and pay for it themselves ($132.50 each and good for only five years) but not everyone is happy with the little marvel that carries so much identity information on a chip. For example, Houston longshoremen carry their cards in their hip pockets, where the cards get bent and the chips inside become broken. (The card is supposed to be carried on a lanyard around the neck but many think this practice is hazardous). And airport security workers have refused to accept a TWIC as evidence of a mariner’s identity although the card is government-issued and is on the Homeland Security’s list of approved IDs.
A Korean shipping company was fined $852,000 for carrying more than 1,400 tons of toxic waste from Europe to Brazil in 89 containers. Their contents were supposed to be clean plastic for recycling but included soiled diapers and other nasties.
Imports
Justice can be slow and perhaps not very just. Three years after their arrest, two Ukrainian officers were sentenced in Venezuela to nine years in jail for cocaine smuggling. Divers had found 128 kg of the white powder clamped to the hull of their ship, the bulker B Atlantic.
Packaged cocaine must have a distinctive smell because the crew of a Columbia Navy patrol boat reported it smelled 12 tons ($240 million worth) of cocaine in the hull of a 50-foot semi-submersible smuggler two miles away and gave chase.
Royal Navy destroyer HMS Gloucester vs. the 36-foot sailboat Tortuga in mid-Atlantic – no contest! The American-registered Tortuga was taken to Cape Verde where inspectors found £4 million worth of cocaine packets built into its hollow rudder. The destroyer had been en route to its station in the Falkland Islands when it was asked to accept a Cape Verdean law enforcement team.
Nature
The Danish Navy stopped the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza on its way to an Arctic oilrig off the island of Disko near Greenland. Greenpeace’s plan was to protest drilling in 500 meters as too dangerous to the environment.
Five Inuit villages in Canada near Greenland got an injunction that stopped a German icebreaker from conducting seismic tests that could be possibly dangerous to the environment in an area that abounds in wildlife and, possibly, gas, oil, and minerals
LNG seems to be the fuel of the future and a Swedish shipowner is one of the first to use LNG in its ships. The company is converting its 25,000-dwt tanker Bit Viking from heavy oil fuel to LNG. One reason for the conversion may be that the twin-engined vessel normally operates in Norwegian waters where NOx is taxed.
The Richter scale 7.1 earthquake that ravaged Christchurch, New Zealand moved parts of that country up to 11 feet closer to Australia. It is not clear whether airfares between the two nations will be reduced.
In Australia, the Brisbane River is full of bull sharks. Those found up-river are normally less than 1.5 meters long but when the water warms up in summer, they leap out of the water and spin around. Although bull sharks don’t target humans, they have been known to grab one here and there, and Brisbane-local sharks did bite the hand and finger of a boy, attack a racehorse being exercised in the water, and snap up a Chihuahua.
Metal Bashing
Vietnamese officials arrested another four executives of that nation’s fast-growing, state-owned shipbuilding industry. Two of them had made major purchases when the state had already expressed its disapproval. The other two had intentionally violated regulations, thus causing grievous losses.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Piracy charges against six Somali pirates were dismissed because a 1819 US law said piracy was maritime robbery and the suspects hadn’t been caught while actually committing a robbery. (They had only approached and shot at a US warship.) Congress was asked to pass a more-suitable law defining piracy for the contemporary scene.
Conditions were just right and appropriate forces (the amphibious transport dock USS Dubuque and the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton) were present so 24 battle-experienced US Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit on the Dubuque boarded the German-owned but Somali pirate-controlled bulker Magellan Star and took over. Nine pirates were captured and none of the crew or Marines were injured.
Odd Bits and Head Shakers
The 1864-built square-rigger City of Adelaide, the world’s oldest clipper ship, made some 23 emigrant-carrying round trips between the UK and Adelaide but, in recent years, its hull has been parked at Irvine in Scotland. Four options for its future were identified, with the leader being what authorities called “an archaeological deconstruction” (aka demolition). Option four was to transfer the hull to an Australian entity and, luckily, the City of Adelaide Preservation Trust wanted possession of the old vessel. Now there is the problem of how to get the relic to Australia in time for the celebration in 2011 of South Australia’s 175th anniversary of the State. (For those interested in genealogical data, about a quarter million Ozzies owe their existence to ancestors who emigrated in the old ship.)
Billionaires must find it hard to spend all their wealth. One arrived at Sydney aboard his Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran largely made from recycled plastic beverage bottles held together by an organic glue made from cashew nuts and sugar cane. The 12,860-km voyage from San Francisco took 128 days and he was seasick most of the time. But an onboard filmmaker had been able to watch the birth of a son via Skype over the Internet.
Some years ago, the master of the Zim Mexico was prosecuted in the US after his ship hit a shore-side crane, toppling it and killing an electrician inside. The master was judged to be guilty (he hadn’t notified the pilot about an “erratic” bow thruster although the thruster had worked the last fifty times or more). The case raised much international furor over its unfairness. Recently, he and three friends were fishing off the coast of County Cork when their boat caught fire. He and two other friends didn’t survive.
In the UK, Greenwich University kicked off a EU-sponsored study called Safeguard that focused on ship-evacuation and safety procedures. The fire-safety engineering group ran an unprecedented research project on the cruise ship Jewel of the Sea in which more than 2,300 passengers took part in an assembly drill while at sea. The passengers wore infrared tracking tags and were monitored by more than 100 video cameras as they moved about the ship on twelve decks to reach their assembly areas. As the project leader later exulted, “This assembly was unique in several aspects, as we collected data from a large cruise ship during a virtually unannounced assembly drill and while we were actually at sea.”
December 2009 was a bad month for the US Coast Guard: two of its small boats collided with other vessels. One was at Charleston, South Carolina and the other at San Diego, California. One child was killed and several injured. A common denominator in these accidents seems to have been that the Coast Guard boat operators were using cell phones for texting or conversation not pertinent to the job.
For many years, British mariners guilty of “unwanted and/or improper attention” towards female passengers were charged with “broaching cargo.”
Due to the world’s economic situation and declining sea trade, orders for new ships declined last year but ship deliveries grew to 75.7 million gross tons compared to 64.2 million gross tons on 2008.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
At Constanza, the container ship Medy loaded scrap (in containers?) and sailed for Turkey. Shortly afterwards, it called for help and a Romanian rescue vessel took the crew of 17 off the badly listing vessel. Soon afterward, the Medy sank. Off Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan, the dredger Anabar ran onto rocks while outside a port and one of a crew of twenty went missing. In Russia’s Laptev Sea in the Arctic region, the tugboat Alexel Kulakovsky sank and a nearby tanker could find only the captain and two sailors. A prolonged search failed to find any bodies but did spot an empty liferaft. Off the west coast of South Korea, the South Korean cargo ship Ocean Ace No. 6 ran down an anonymous Chinese fishing boat and all its crew died.
In China in an area east of Changbai, the product tanker Jin He ran aground near the harbor entrance. The next high tide straightened up the listing vessel and local tugs managed to free it. At Kavaratti Island in Lakshadweep, the cement-carrying freighter Nand Aparajita ended up perched on a coral reef. The reef is among the finest in India. In American Samoa, the tourist submarine Atlantis V went aground in Apra Harbor. No tourists were on board and a tug freed the sub later that day. The fishing boat-refueling tanker Hai Soon 5 ran aground on the western reef off Bipi Island, Manus Province, and Papua New Guinea officials said it was fully loaded. The combined chemical and oil tanker Clipper Tobago ran aground off Guatemala. The ship was on passa ge from Houston to Santo Tomas di Castilla with a cargo of tallow and catering greases. (Extensive research failed to find a definition for the last but it may be the greases that accumulate in restaurant grease traps or used deep-fat frying oils.)
The in-ballast Belgian VLCC Flandre collided with the far-smaller coastal bulker Hua Chi 8 off the coast of China’s Zhejiang province, and the big one won. Six mariners died. Somewhere above the Russian landmass in difficult ice conditions and poor visibility, the Russian tankers Indiga and Varzuga collided in that nation’s North East Passage. Some hull damage resulted but no spill of its cargo (diesel oil) or bunkers. Both vessels resumed steaming for Chukota in the Far East.
Ghanaian authorities ordered that the product tanker Seven Seas be beached after it collided with a Cambodian cargo ship. Locals decided to vandalize the ship and about 200 were present while fuel was being siphoned off. Four were killed and another 70 injured when there was an explosion. Explosion and fire on the Vermillion Oil Platform No. 380 some 90 miles south of the Louisiana coast forced 13 workers into the water. Twelve of the well-trained men were spotted in life preservers and clipped together for maximum visibility for searchers. They were supporting a thirteenth man without a preserver. The platform only produces gas and oil and there was no spill.
The chief engineer of the bulk carrier Almeda died from drinking industrial alcohol while the ship was sailing to the Red Sea’s Port Sudan. An explosion at an east China shipyard killed five and left one worker missing.
A sick 3-year-old boy was airlifted from the ferry Stena Europe while it was 13 miles from Stumble Head on the west coast of Wales. Not far away, a lifeboat was taking a sick seaman to a hospital from the merchant vessel Marida Melissa. The lifeboat was used because the local RAF rescue helicopter was busy transporting the little boy.
Gray Fleets
The nearly new destroyer HMS Daring suffered a long dent when its escorting tug Svitzer Sussex lost power and steering control and they collided. The tug, protected by much rubber fendering, was unharmed.
The Royal Navy will scrap the icebreaker HMS Endurance and replace it with a leased or purchased Norwegian icebreaker, and it may receive the same name. The Endurance nearly sank when someone improperly opened an engineroom valve during maintenance while the ship was off the coast of Chile and that caused £30 million of damages. The icebreaker is a key contributor to Royal Navy presence in the South Atlantic.
The Canadian Navy may pare down the number of ships or reduce the capability of its Arctic/Offshore Patrol Ship program due to strict budget constraints on the CAD3.1 billion (USD2.9 billion) program. Measures included reducing the caliber of the main gun from 76 mm or 57 mm to 25 mm, using less-powerful engines, and only building six hulls instead of the "six to eight" specified previously.
The president of Ghana wanted “big” ships for that nation’s navy so he bought two elderly East German fast patrol craft that had been built in the late Seventies and retired in 2005. He paid a staggering $38 million, $23 million for the boats and another $15 million for refurbishment. (Tunisia purchased six of the better boats, two were sold to private parties, and the last two will be scrapped.)
In recent months, British subs have had frequent encounters with Russian attack subs and there seems to be only one reasonable answer to the sudden popularity of the Brit subs. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian Navy has put submarines on patrol so infrequently that officials must have suddenly realized that its library of vessel and other marine sounds is obsolete and needed refreshing. One may surmise that submarines of other nations are also being dogged, but the Yanks, French, and Chinese aren’t talking.
A New Jersey salvage company will recover the remains of USS Scorpion, Commodore Joshua Barney’s flagship of a small fleet of shallow-draft warships in the War of 1812. At the abortive Battle of Bladensburg , his ships and marines were far more effective than the US land forces in attempting to slow British forces advancing on Washington, DC. In the end, Barney was forced to scuttle his flotilla way up the Patuxent River at Pig Point and surrender. He was promptly paroled by the British commander, who had recognized his dogged gallantry.
The executive officer of the Indian Navy submarine INS Shankush lost his life about 60 miles off Mumbia when a wave swept him off the sub’s deck while he and five others were trying to rescue a maintenance worker who had fallen into the sea.
White Fleets
In Canada’s far north some 55 miles from Kugluktuk (aka Coppermine), the cruise ship Clipper Adventure ended up on some rocks and the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen was sent to take off the 110 passengers and 69 crewmembers.
The Explorer of the Seas (3,100 passengers) and the smaller Independence (100 passengers) sought refuge from Hurricane Earl at Portland, Maine. Passengers on the first vessel reported it had steamed for Portland at its top cruising speed of 23 knots and it had been too windy to stand on deck. (The hurricane’s impact on Portland was minimal but offshore waves were reported to be 15 -25 feet.)
In Russia, the river cruise vessel Viking Kirov hit a barge while on a cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. None of the nearly 300 passengers on the American-operated vessel were hurt and alcohol was mentioned as a possible contributor to the excitement.
A 72 year-old woman with head injuries was heli-lifted off the Island Princess 63 miles from Yakutat in Alaska.
Some junior crewmembers of some cruise ships are into child porn. Convicted in May was an assistant waiter on the Costa Atlantica and an assistant room steward on the Carnival Glory was recently arrested at Halifax.
Sixteen Brits are suing a cruise company because the Alexy Maryshev was too close to a glacier when it calved in 2007. Most of the 48 passengers were on the foredeck to get good close-up photos of the glacier and many were hurt, some seriously, by falling chunks of ice and violent wave motions induced by the calving. The cruise ship was originally an ice-strengthened research vessel.
They That Go Back and Forth
The operator of a Le Havre-Portsmouth ferry line substituted the ferry Cote d’Albatre on that route after the high-speed catamaran ro/ro Norman Arrow struck a mooring buoy at Le Havre and holed itself below the waterline
Five people were injured at Mayne Island when the British Columbia ferry Queen of Nanaimo made a very hard landing even though an anchor had been dropped. One passenger was airlifted to a hospital.
The State of North Carolina hired a retired Coast Guardsman to head up its ferry division. Within two months he reported nepotism, payroll padding, and out-of-control spending and he was promptly fired for not being a team player. But his reports triggered investigations that showed he was right – among other things, a list of ferry employees showed many repeats of the same surnames.
In central Manitoba on the Bloodvein River, a probably intoxicated young man threatened to jump into the river so the ferry returned to the dock. There, two Mounties attempted to speak to the youth. He backed away, then jumped off the ferry. One Mountie felt he had to jump in to save the teenager, who appeared to be sinking. In full accordance with ancient traditions of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mountie got his man!
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a river ferry caught fire while on the Kasai River, a tributary of the Congo River. Only fifteen people made it to shore and some 200 others died. Meanwhile in the same country, a fishing vessel capsized and 24 (according to the government) or 60 (reports from locals) people died.
Legal Matters
Usually the US government wins when it comes to prosecutions involving oily water separators, ”magic pipes,” and erring logbooks but a jury recently acquitted the chief engineer of the tanker Georgios M of five such charges. Earlier, his employer had paid a $1.3 million fine and cooperated with the prosecutors in their assault on the chief. Now he’s suing his employer and the tanker for $22.8 million for their complicity in his 28-month incarceration in Texas. However, the US government won in the case against the chief engineer of the bulker New Fortune for a “magic pipe” violation. His punishment was surprisingly mild: he got three years of probation, a $5,000 fine, and a $100 special assessment for failing to maintain an oil record book. The Greek owners paid a $750,000 fine and a community service payment of $100,000.
The Ukrainian master of the Dutch coaster Flinterforest was drunk (at least twice the legal limit) when he ran his ship aground in the Orestund strait that separates Sweden and Denmark. A Malmo court let him off with a sentence of the 17 days of time he had already served but his career was probably finished. And in Wellington, New Zealand, a cargo ship failed to sail because its master was too drunk. The harbormaster described him as, “I understand he was conscious but not feeling well.” The owners flew a new skipper from Japan. Authorities would not release the ship’s name but a news account at its next port revealed that it was the Tasman Pathfinder.
Waterfront workers in the US must possess a TWIC (Transportation Worker Identification Credential) card and pay for it themselves ($132.50 each and good for only five years) but not everyone is happy with the little marvel that carries so much identity information on a chip. For example, Houston longshoremen carry their cards in their hip pockets, where the cards get bent and the chips inside become broken. (The card is supposed to be carried on a lanyard around the neck but many think this practice is hazardous). And airport security workers have refused to accept a TWIC as evidence of a mariner’s identity although the card is government-issued and is on the Homeland Security’s list of approved IDs.
A Korean shipping company was fined $852,000 for carrying more than 1,400 tons of toxic waste from Europe to Brazil in 89 containers. Their contents were supposed to be clean plastic for recycling but included soiled diapers and other nasties.
Imports
Justice can be slow and perhaps not very just. Three years after their arrest, two Ukrainian officers were sentenced in Venezuela to nine years in jail for cocaine smuggling. Divers had found 128 kg of the white powder clamped to the hull of their ship, the bulker B Atlantic.
Packaged cocaine must have a distinctive smell because the crew of a Columbia Navy patrol boat reported it smelled 12 tons ($240 million worth) of cocaine in the hull of a 50-foot semi-submersible smuggler two miles away and gave chase.
Royal Navy destroyer HMS Gloucester vs. the 36-foot sailboat Tortuga in mid-Atlantic – no contest! The American-registered Tortuga was taken to Cape Verde where inspectors found £4 million worth of cocaine packets built into its hollow rudder. The destroyer had been en route to its station in the Falkland Islands when it was asked to accept a Cape Verdean law enforcement team.
Nature
The Danish Navy stopped the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza on its way to an Arctic oilrig off the island of Disko near Greenland. Greenpeace’s plan was to protest drilling in 500 meters as too dangerous to the environment.
Five Inuit villages in Canada near Greenland got an injunction that stopped a German icebreaker from conducting seismic tests that could be possibly dangerous to the environment in an area that abounds in wildlife and, possibly, gas, oil, and minerals
LNG seems to be the fuel of the future and a Swedish shipowner is one of the first to use LNG in its ships. The company is converting its 25,000-dwt tanker Bit Viking from heavy oil fuel to LNG. One reason for the conversion may be that the twin-engined vessel normally operates in Norwegian waters where NOx is taxed.
The Richter scale 7.1 earthquake that ravaged Christchurch, New Zealand moved parts of that country up to 11 feet closer to Australia. It is not clear whether airfares between the two nations will be reduced.
In Australia, the Brisbane River is full of bull sharks. Those found up-river are normally less than 1.5 meters long but when the water warms up in summer, they leap out of the water and spin around. Although bull sharks don’t target humans, they have been known to grab one here and there, and Brisbane-local sharks did bite the hand and finger of a boy, attack a racehorse being exercised in the water, and snap up a Chihuahua.
Metal Bashing
Vietnamese officials arrested another four executives of that nation’s fast-growing, state-owned shipbuilding industry. Two of them had made major purchases when the state had already expressed its disapproval. The other two had intentionally violated regulations, thus causing grievous losses.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Piracy charges against six Somali pirates were dismissed because a 1819 US law said piracy was maritime robbery and the suspects hadn’t been caught while actually committing a robbery. (They had only approached and shot at a US warship.) Congress was asked to pass a more-suitable law defining piracy for the contemporary scene.
Conditions were just right and appropriate forces (the amphibious transport dock USS Dubuque and the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton) were present so 24 battle-experienced US Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit on the Dubuque boarded the German-owned but Somali pirate-controlled bulker Magellan Star and took over. Nine pirates were captured and none of the crew or Marines were injured.
Odd Bits and Head Shakers
The 1864-built square-rigger City of Adelaide, the world’s oldest clipper ship, made some 23 emigrant-carrying round trips between the UK and Adelaide but, in recent years, its hull has been parked at Irvine in Scotland. Four options for its future were identified, with the leader being what authorities called “an archaeological deconstruction” (aka demolition). Option four was to transfer the hull to an Australian entity and, luckily, the City of Adelaide Preservation Trust wanted possession of the old vessel. Now there is the problem of how to get the relic to Australia in time for the celebration in 2011 of South Australia’s 175th anniversary of the State. (For those interested in genealogical data, about a quarter million Ozzies owe their existence to ancestors who emigrated in the old ship.)
Billionaires must find it hard to spend all their wealth. One arrived at Sydney aboard his Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran largely made from recycled plastic beverage bottles held together by an organic glue made from cashew nuts and sugar cane. The 12,860-km voyage from San Francisco took 128 days and he was seasick most of the time. But an onboard filmmaker had been able to watch the birth of a son via Skype over the Internet.
Some years ago, the master of the Zim Mexico was prosecuted in the US after his ship hit a shore-side crane, toppling it and killing an electrician inside. The master was judged to be guilty (he hadn’t notified the pilot about an “erratic” bow thruster although the thruster had worked the last fifty times or more). The case raised much international furor over its unfairness. Recently, he and three friends were fishing off the coast of County Cork when their boat caught fire. He and two other friends didn’t survive.
In the UK, Greenwich University kicked off a EU-sponsored study called Safeguard that focused on ship-evacuation and safety procedures. The fire-safety engineering group ran an unprecedented research project on the cruise ship Jewel of the Sea in which more than 2,300 passengers took part in an assembly drill while at sea. The passengers wore infrared tracking tags and were monitored by more than 100 video cameras as they moved about the ship on twelve decks to reach their assembly areas. As the project leader later exulted, “This assembly was unique in several aspects, as we collected data from a large cruise ship during a virtually unannounced assembly drill and while we were actually at sea.”
December 2009 was a bad month for the US Coast Guard: two of its small boats collided with other vessels. One was at Charleston, South Carolina and the other at San Diego, California. One child was killed and several injured. A common denominator in these accidents seems to have been that the Coast Guard boat operators were using cell phones for texting or conversation not pertinent to the job.
For many years, British mariners guilty of “unwanted and/or improper attention” towards female passengers were charged with “broaching cargo.”
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Other Shores - September 2010
Last month, US merchants were still worried whether there will be enough empty containers in the Far East to get Christmas goods in-country in time for the holidays.
Researchers working for Parks Canada found the hull of HMS Investigator, abandoned and sunk more than 150 years ago after being trapped in the ice at Banks Island’s Mercy Bay in Canada’s far north. The vessel had been searching for Sir John Franklin’s HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. The Investigator stands upright and intact, although its masts have been sheared off by icebergs. Its crew had walked over the ice to Beechey Island where they and the crew of HMS Resolute, deserted at Dealey Island, were rescued by HMS Northern Star, HMS Phoebe, and HMS Talbot. The North was a busy place in 1853.
With six months to the deadline for continued operation of single-hull VLCC tankers, only 53 were operating last month. The others are being changed into bulkers (14), used for storage (9 plus 6 Supermax tankers), or are being equipped with double hulls (1).
Is there really a worldwide depression? Forty-five car carriers arrived at the German port of Bremerhaven in a single week in mid-July, twice the normal rate of about 25 such ships. In fact, things were so busy that nine carriers were unable to dock upon arrival. Most of the vehicles were exports to the Far East and the US. Imports were far down, as a result of the failure of Germany’s cash-for-clunkers program and the building of car factories in Eastern Europe by Korean and Japanese car companies.
Congress has required that all containers entering the US by 2014 must be 100 percent scanned at foreign ports but it seems that that would require technologies that do not yet exist, much additional manpower, and the rebuilding of many foreign ports to create a single area through which all cargo would pass.
A massive fleet of vessels supported well shutoff and oil cleanup operations in the Gulf of Mexico after a well being drilled by the mobile drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew out and the rig burned and then sank. The well dumped an estimated 4.9 million barrels (of 42 gallons each) of crude oil into the Gulf before the well was capped on Day 86 after the blowout. A fleet of nearly 600 skimmers, including from a converted supertanker (it didn’t work out well), most of the non-profit Marine Spill Response Corporation’s fifteen-vessel fleet of big skimmers, and local shrimpers towing collection booms from their boomed-out outriggers, recovered an estimated 2.9 million gallons of oil.
Many wonderfully designed vessels of many foreign nations work in the Gulf of Mexico energy area because there are not enough American-flagged, America-manned vessels that can supply the necessary highly specialized services. This came to public attention because of the Deepwater Horizon spill and there were demands that laws be changed so only American-flagged, American-manned, American-owned vessels can be used in the US’s exclusive economic zone. If enacted, look for severe and devastating impacts on the cost of oil and gas.
The International Whaling Commission met in Morocco and the world’s three still-whaling nations (Japan, Norway, and Iceland) nearly had enough votes to cause cancellation of the 24-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling. The vote failed because of revelations that Japan had been providing bribes and babes, (openly admitted by the representatives of some small developing nations) and had paid the £4,000 bill for the chairman of the meeting’s stay at a luxury Moroccan hotel. The Commission decided to review the Commission’s rules and thus provide a cooling-off period until the next meeting.
UN peacekeepers in Haiti have been living aboard two cruise ships. The Sea Voyager (aka “The Love Boat” among UN staffers) left in May but the Venezuelan-registered Ola Esmeralda (ex-Black Prince) will stay on until the end of August at a daily cost of $72,500. That rate has been called “outrageous, ridiculous….I’d love to have that contract.” The UN’s World Food Program selected the ship over four others in competitive bidding because it “was the most cost effective in terms of price per cabin.” Others estimated that the ship is generating a cash flow of at least $29,000 a day.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Help was quickly sent to the Khalijia-3 after it reported it was taking on water and sinking off the Mumbia (remember, think of it as Bombay) coast. Its crew of 28 was removed while the Indian Coast Guard’s fast patrol vessel Subhadra Kumari Chauhan supplied enough pumping power to save the ship and its cargo of coiled steel during a six-hour operation. Rescuers found the water tanker Varnek upside down off the coast of the Kanin Peninsula and nobody, alive or dead. (For the curious but lazy: This peninsula in the northern European part of the USSR separates the northern part of the White Sea from the shallow Cheshskaia Guba of the Barents Sea and gave its name to a class of Cold War Soviet destroyers.)
At Mumbia, the container ship Chitra was in violent contact with the Khlijia and both ended up aground. The Chitra was nearly on its side and badly leaking oil, and the other vessel was nose-up. The Chitra also was periodically shedding containers, which littered the nearby local waters until they sank.
Where the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway intersects the Houston Ship Channel, the tanker Isabel Knutsen ran aground on mud flats after its steering failed. Initial efforts by three powerful tugs proved useless but the grounding did not affect traffic on either of the busy channels. (For those who have taken a ferry from Galveston to Bolivar Island, the grounding was one-quarter miles east of the Port Bolivar ferry landing.) The general cargo/container ship Transport did grievous damage to its stem and bulbous bow while docking at George Town at Grand Cayman, Antigua &; Barbuda. (The vessel operates a regular service between Mobile, Alabama and the port.) On the Amazon, the Panamax bulker Hellenic Star found it advisable to quickly deviate from its course to avoid a potential collision with an oncoming vessel and so it ran aground and suffered enough damage so that water ingress became a problem. (For those interested in the economics of vessel operation, this vessel was on time-charter at a gross rate of $23,000 a day.)
An accident at an Alang shipbreaking yard left one worker dead and four others injured. Workers were cutting a scrap piece with a gas cutter near a ship's engine room. Though the fire was quickly brought under control, one man had died on the spot. In Manila’s north harbor, an explosion (cause not specified) set the cargo vessel West Ocean 1 on fire. Nobody was hurt and the fire was kept from spreading to other parts of the ship.
Improper use of a desulphurizing chemical after a 300,000-ton tanker had finished unloading crude oil caused the rupture of a pipeline near the northern Chinese port of Dalian. The explosion caused a nearby, smaller pipeline to burst and together they caused a massive oil spill estimated at about 1,500 tons or 400,000 gallons. One cleanup worker drowned in a pool of crude oil and other workers were reported as using bare hands and chopsticks to scoop up oil.
A Russian electrical engineer disappeared from the LPG carrier Summerset while it was anchored off the shipbreaking beach at Alang in India. In the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia, a female cadet on the Safmarine Kariba reported to the master that she had been raped by the chief officer. The master called a meeting of the concerned parties, she failed to appear, a search was started, and her body was found in the water several hours later. The chief mate was fired.
An Alaska-based Coast Guard helicopter took a mariner off the US-flagged taker Alaskan Explorer some 200 miles south of Sitka. He was suffering from chest pains.
The container ship Altivia arrived at Guam from South Korea and its cargo of containers were found to be heavily infested with spiders not native to Guam. The containers were hurriedly closed and reloaded and the ship was ordered to return to South Korea.
The Strait of Hormuz is a choke point for tankers serving the Persian Gulf. The Strait is 21 miles wide at its narrowest and is created by a narrow peninsula belonging to the United Arab Emirates that thrusts menacingly into the belly of Iran. Each day through the Strait pass about 17 million barrels of crude or nearly 20 percent of what the world needs. Traffic has been peaceful since the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, when dozens of ships of many nationalities were attacked (incidentally, tankers are remarkably resistant to sinking). Maybe the peaceful days are over. The Japanese VLCC M Star, loaded with one million tons of crude oil and heading for Japan, was attacked by what was finally declared to be a suicide boat. Initial reports attributed blame to a collision with a submarine or a rogue wave due to seismic activity somewhere (but there was none nearby) but a large area of dished-in and scorched plating the full height of the ship’s starboard quarter and extensive onboard damage (such as a lifeboat blown out of its position) soon brought realization that the probable cause was a suicide small boat that had exploded near but not against the hull. A terrorist group then confirmed that suspicion and supplied the driver’s name. He will not get a second chance to sink the Star M or any other ship.
Gray Fleets
Russia will boost its defense spending by more than 60 percent by 2014. That translates to an annual 2.025 billion rubles. The Navy will spend its share on the development of new submarines and the Bulava missile system, upgrades of the Black Sea Fleet and acquisition of two French-built Mistral amphibious landing ships. (Russia has previously announced that these sophisticated ships plus possibly two-Russian-built sisters would become part of the Black Sea fleet where the most-probable enemy is Turkey or the Ukraine. Other Western nations wish that France would not transfer western navy technology to a former enemy.) The 21,300-ton Mistral-class “BPC” (Batiments de Projection et de Commandement) ships operate as helicopter carriers and amphibious assault transports, with secondary capabilities as command and hospital ships. One of the vessels can carry 700 troops or evacuees for short periods. Normal hospital capacity is 69 beds, with a fully equipped operating room. That capacity can also be expanded in emergencies by appropriating other ship spaces. The command post section is not expandable, but has workstations for up to 150 personnel.
The British military structure must be made smaller, but how to do so is raising some interesting prospects. For example, it is possible that the Royal Marines could be handed over to the British Army and combined with the Paras. “Are the plans a touch mad? Possibly. Are they being discussed? Absolutely.” stated a senior defense figure. It is expected that the nation’s Ministry of Defence will tell the Army, Navy, and RAF to get rid of 16,000 personnel, hundreds of tanks, and half a dozen ships. That would leave the RAF smaller than it was in 1914—that’s World War One!
White Fleets
A gangway to the cruise ship MSC Spendid gave way while passengers were boarding at Genoa and an elderly woman fell to her death. Her husband hit the quay and suffered severe head and leg injuries. The Emerald Princess lost all power shortly after leaving Port Everglades and passengers enjoyed only intermittent hotel services for almost six hours and the ship missed a stop at Princess Cay. The body of a juvenile humpback whale was spotted atop the bulbous bow of the Sapphire Princess while it was steaming south of Juneau, Alaska in Tracy Sound. A tug soon arrived to pull the whale free and tow it elsewhere for a discreet necropsy to determine the cause of death.
Over the next few years, cruise ships will be required to use low-sulphur fuel while in the national waters of Canada and the US. The prospect caused one British cruise company to announce it may drop calls at ports like Halifax and Victoria, British Columbia. Currently, fuels with 1.5 to 2-5% sulphur are used but the sulphur level must drop to 1% in 2012 and to 0.1% in 2015. These changes will save 14,000 lives a year, predicted the US Environmental Protection Agency, but there are questions whether such fuels will even be available.
Those That Go Back and Forth
On Lake Victoria, a passenger boat capsized with sixty on board, mostly traders with their merchandise. Only four people were rescued. They had held onto pieces of wood and sacks of fish. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a (probably overloaded) ferry carrying passengers to the capital of Kinshasha sank in the Kasai River in the western province of Bandundu, leaving at least 138 dead. On Lake Victoria, a boat carrying 36 people, almost all of them primary-school children, capsized in strong winds and half of the children did not survive.
Legal Matters
Legal penalties vary tremendously worldwide. In the Philippines, the Coast Guard arrested the product tanker BMI Angelita for discharging about 15 liters (about four gallons) of oily waste water from its flooded engineroom. (The ship had gone aground at the height of typhoon Conson.) The arrest will be lifted as soon as the owners pay a fine of 10,000 pesos (about $217).
Illegal Imports
The car carrier Frontier Ace arrived at Walvis Bay in Namibia with several stowaways crouched atop its rudder. They had boarded at Lagos, Nigeria.
Metal-Bashing
Massachusetts’ senior senator John Kerry had the 76-foot sailboat Isabel built in New Zealand for about $7 million and apparently intended to put it into the charter business out of Rhode Island’s Newport, a popular port for East Coast charterers. It should be noted that Rhode Island is a state without a sales tax while the Massachusetts sales tax is 6.25%. The senator didn’t have to pay the Massachusetts sales tax of $437,500 if the luxury vessel stayed out of Massachusetts’ waters for six months but it was spotted at Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard shortly after delivery. (The Senator and his multi-million-dollared wife have a summer place on Nantucket.) When these inconvenient facts were brought to a flustered Senator’s attention, he agreed to pay the sales tax (plus an annual vessel excise tax of about $70,000) “if the taxes are owed.”
Nature
Revenge for ancient whaling kills or merely an accident? You choose. Off Cape Town, quite near Robben’s Island (where Nelson Mandela was jailed for so many years), a couple on the cruising sailboat Intrepid cut the engine to watch a southern right whale gambol nearby. Suddenly, the nearsighted cetacean swam in their direction, broached high out of the water, and crashed down on the yacht’s deck. Away went the mast and the whale swam away, perhaps missing some blubber. A nearby vessel got the whole episode on some-what shaky video. (Neither human on the Intrepid was injured.)
In Alaska, the operator of a 34-foot jet boat taking loggers to work sites intentionally deviated from his course and hit humpback whales at high speed on two separate occasions. He got a remarkably light sentence of two years of probation and a $1,000 fine.
In the Philippines, the Coast Guard wants the owners of the coal-laden barge Gold Trans 306 to get it off a coral reef near Batangas (the barge is badly damaged) and to collect all of the coal that fell overboard so the reef and marine life would not be adversely affected. (The barge was another victim of typhoon Conson after its towline snapped.)
The Norwegian Polar Institute claimed at the abortive Copenhagen Climate Change Conference last year that sea levels may rise by 0.5 to 1.5 metres before the end of this century. If true, that will inconvenience about 150 million people. Most of the sea rise will be caused by melting ice and snow with 25% contributed by the expansion of the warming waters.
On Rwanda’s Lake Kivu, a barge has started collecting volcanic gasses in the fizzy lake. They are pumped ashore where methane is separated out and used to power three large generators that create electricity for that power-short nation. The volcanic gasses are a product of seismic activity in the Great Rift as Africa slowly splits apart. Historically, Lake Kivu's gasses have been a killer. Deaths attributed to invisible pockets of carbon dioxide along the shoreline are frequently reported. The gasses dissolved in the water, however, present a far greater threat. The ever-expanding volumes of carbon dioxide and methane in Lake Kivu, coupled with nearby volcanic activity, may trigger a “limnic eruption” (also referred to as a lake overturn, in which CO2 suddenly erupts from the lake). These are highly likely at some stage in the future unless degassing occurs. That has begun with the extraction of some of the 60bn cubic metres of methane in the Lake. The world's only other known "exploding lakes,” Monoun and Nyos, both in Cameroon, overturned in the 1980s. The clouds of carbon dioxide that burst through from the deep water asphyxiated about 1,800 people. But Lake Kivu is nearly 2,000 times larger than Lake Nyos, and is in a far more densely populated area. An American professor described Kivu as possibly "one of the most dangerous lakes in the world. She said, "You don't even want to think about the scale of the devastation that could occur."
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
At Bangladesh’s main port of Chittagong, a small group of pirates seemingly specializes in stealing one type of relatively low-cost items. Four pirates armed only with long knives took four mooring lines from the container ship PFS Keshava while it was anchored in Anchorage A. Then a week later in Anchorage C, four long knife-armed pirates boarded the bulker Hong Kong Star and got away with four mooring lines. A watchman failed to spot them and the loss was only noted when it came time to anchor the vessel.
Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
Ordnance left over from World War II’s Pacific battles still pose dangers. About fifteen Solomon Islanders lose their lives each year due to still-viable explosives. Royal Australian Navy divers have been training members of the Royal Solomon Island Police divers in explosive ordnance disposal techniques.
Insufficient dredging kept the Chinese-flagged Zhen Hua 10 from approaching near enough to a wharf to unload the first four container cranes that will be essential parts of making Cochin into India’s first international transshipment port. Rapid dredging enabled the ship to unground and deliver its towering cranes.
Near-misses, hails from another yacht, horn blasts from a coaster’s horn, and radio calls from the Coastguard failed to alert anybody on the yacht Erma, a sailboat jogging along under only a jib in the middle of an incredibly busy English Channel. But siren blasts from a hovering Coastguard helicopter brought a sole navigator topsides. He said he was sailing from Portland to the Azores and had been busy below. (Sleeping, perhaps?)
Monday, August 2, 2010
Other Shores - August 2010
by Hugh Ware
Arrivals of containers at Vancouver, BC hit a 20-month high. Container traffic at Long Beach went up 14 percent over a year ago while arrivals at Los Angles rose nearly 27 percent. Shipping giant Maersk reported a shortage of both space and containers for outbound Far East shipments (“It is a very exceptional year”) although the company owns 1.3 million containers and recently added another 50,000 FEU.
Arrivals of containers at Vancouver, BC hit a 20-month high. Container traffic at Long Beach went up 14 percent over a year ago while arrivals at Los Angles rose nearly 27 percent. Shipping giant Maersk reported a shortage of both space and containers for outbound Far East shipments (“It is a very exceptional year”) although the company owns 1.3 million containers and recently added another 50,000 FEU.
Asian demand for oil drove VLCC rates to a five-month high, from $41,800 to $78,900 a day for the Arabian Gulf-Far East run.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
At Le Havre, the vehicle carrier Grande Buenos Aires was caught by wind gusts while entering the lock and was pushed against the lock head. It was damaged and the ship suffered a gash several meters long at the waterline. About 42 miles east of Gibraltar, the product tanker Torm Marina collided with the container ship MSC Camille. Luckily, the tanker was in ballast so no ”boom.” At Durress in Albania, the 3,000-ton freighter Ruby approached a pier at six knots but its engine failed to reverse. It struck the cargo vessel Storman Asia near the bow. Alerted by frantic radio calls, crewmen on the nearby San Gwann took some spectacular photos.
The coaster Uno and its cargo of soy beans ran aground underneath Valdemar’s Castle in Denmark’s Svenborg Sound. The master explained he had been avoiding a yacht race involving about forty boats. (The castle was built by King Christian IV for his son but he was killed in a battle in Poland during 1656 before he could move in.) In Hong Kong waters, the containership Kota Kado struck a submerged object and was beached. On the St Lawrence Seaway, the 740-foot laker Algobay ran aground and was freed by two tugs and her own power three days later. In New Zealand at Tauranga, the outbound log carrier Hanjin Bombay ran aground but was freed by two tugs two hours later. (The following may not apply to the last item but some years ago, I was told that a Tauranga pilot might pilot ships one week, run a tug propelled by Voith’s cycloidal propellers the next week, and in the third week operate the other port authority’s tug, one fitted with the radically different azimuthing drives. I queried whether they ever got confused but the confident answer was “no.”)
In the Malacca Strait, a fire that started in a container on the foredeck of the 8,195-TEU container ship Charlotte Maersk raged for two days before being put under control (but not out). In Scotland at Lochaber, a conveyor belt loading large stones from a quarry onto the 100,000-ton bulker Yeoman Bontrup caught fire and that set the ship on fire. A tug, ironically named Boulder, was sent to tow the badly damaged ship elsewhere for repairs. At Tampa, a conveyor belt unloading granite rocks from the 742-foot, self-unloading bulker Sophie Oldendorff caught fire and that proved a challenge for local firemen.
A Turkish worker died under tons of material in a forklift accident at one of Tuzla’s many shipyards. He was the area’s 135th shipyard fatality since the Eighties. Off the Croatian coast, a cadet fell off the container ship Safmarine Kariba and his body was found two hours later. A Texas crabber was killed when struck by lightning on the ICW and his companion was airlifted to a hospital.
An Australian helicopter removed a badly burned man whose clothing had caught fire while welding on a coal ship 220 miles off the north Queensland coast. He jumped overboard to extinguish the flames and was rescued by one of the ship’s lifeboats. Off South Africa, two South African Air Force helicopters cooperated in getting an injured mariner off the bulker Proud some 100 miles off Cape Town. One helicopter transferred its extra fuel to the other while both were in flight.
Shortly after the bulker Medi Lausanne was moored at Charleston, South Carolina, along came a strong gust of wind and a stern line parted, followed by the rest of the mooring lines. The ship sailed across the channel and came to a soft grounding with its running gear entangled with a channel marker.
Gray Fleets
The US Navy removed the commander of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard from command due to loss of confidence in his ability to command.
The new Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers HMS Daring and HMS Dauntless finally have missiles for their main weapons systems now that their French-built “Aster” missiles have started passing test-firings.
Indian Navy personnel will train for a year on the former Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov before it is finally delivered late next year. Meanwhile Indian aviators flying MIG 29K jets will train on the Russian’s Admiral Kuznetsov, a similar jump-jet carrier. And two Indian submarines suffered minor damage when one tried to parallel-park against the other at a Mumbai naval jetty.
The Russians announced that they would continue testing the new sea based intercontinental ballistic missile Bulava until it works. Seven out of 13 tests have failed, the last test missile spinning and failing in a spectacular explosion visible in Northern Norway. Three Borey-class submarines to carry the missiles are under construction. And the first attack sub of the Graney class was launched. Construction started in 1993, the launch was deferred for a month, and the news item stated that it would be delivered next year. It will carry 24 cruise missiles.
Smaller services, worldwide, range widely in size. The US Coast Guard has about 39,000 active members (and is heading toward 45,000 personnel) plus 29,000 Auxiliary members; Camp Lejeune, one of the US Marine’s two main training bases, is home to about 47,000 Marines and sailors; the entire Royal Navy has about 38,000 tars and Royal Marines; and the Royal New Zealand Navy has 2,034 regulars plus another 237 Naval reservists.
White Fleets
Hurricane Alex delayed the docking of the cruise-ship Ecstasy at Galveston by a day. The prime cause wasn’t wind but a strong crosscurrent in the channel. The inaugural departure of the newbuild Norwegian Epic from Rotterdam for Southampton was delayed for more than seven hours because of “technical problems.” Compounding the resulting irritation for 2,000 passengers was a breakdown of the security card system and all 2,000 cards had to be signed by hand. Alaskan-based US Coast Guard helicopters serviced two medical emergencies on cruise ships. One chopper took off a man who had suffered lack of consciousness and may have had a stroke. The cruise ship was the Norwegian Pearl and the location was 23 miles southwest of Juneau. The other was an Indonesian crewman on the Ryndam, 110 miles southeast of Cordova. He suffered from weakness and unconsciousness. (Readers may have noted that I report many Alaskan-based Coast Guard helicopter exploits. That is because the 17th Coast Guard District PA office does a superb job of publicizing the District’s valiant work in an extraordinarily taxing region.)
Want to visit the North Pole on a nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker? This year it cost $22,690 for a two-weeks tour on the 2007-built 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory) and a suite cost $33, 390. But you’ll have to book for next year’s cruises; this year’s two remaining tours are already sold out.
Under “cruise ships,” I occasionally include the smaller excursion boats and the like. They had a hard time last month. In Boston, the 87-foot whale-watch boat Massachusetts deviated from the well-marked South Channel and hit a well-known object, the Devil’s Back Ledge, at 18 knots. Nearly 170 passengers were quickly evacuated from the badly damaged vessel and serious salvage pumping started. In Alaska, the 75-foot whale-watch boat Catalyst ran aground near Port Houghton but freed itself on the next high ride. In the meanwhile, the nine passengers were taken by skiff to Robert Island. Near the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, something caused a small boat to jump a wave and land atop another small boat, and one man died. Contributing to the accident may have been the wake from the fast-moving tour boat Shark. At Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the two-man crew of an amphibious truck (DUKW) with 37 tourists on board, mostly a church group of young Hungarians, smelled smoke and stopped the engine to investigate, leaving the boat to drift for several minutes. The operator gave a warning call or calls on Channel 13, the ship-to-ship frequency, but not on channel 16, which is used for emergency calls. The crew of the approaching tugboat Caribbean Sea with the empty city-owned sewerage-sludge barge Resource on its hip didn’t hear the calls or see the drifting DUKW hidden behind the high bow of the empty barge, and the barge ran over the DUKW. Most people escaped due to life vests they had just donned but two Hungarian youngsters didn’t make it.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Competition rowing is big in Brisbane harbor so City Cat ferry boats will be equipped with infra-red cameras to help spot oared shells and their crews. And waterline lighting on the ferries is being investigated so rowers can recognize that a City Cat ferry is nearby.
At Hingham, Massachusetts, the commuter ferry Nora Victoria collided with the sailboat Cygnuc. Minimal sailboat damage and no injuries among the 150+ people involved. At Arkhangelsk, the Russian passenger vessels Nikolai Gogol and Peter Zavarnin managed to collide, fortunately without much damage to each other. (Arkhangelsk, near the Dvina River’s entrance to the White Sea, was medieval Russia’s chief seaport.)
French authorities congratulated the crew of the ro/pax ferry Norman Voyager for going to the rescue of survivors of the French crabber Etoile des Ondes, struck and sunk last December by the bulker Alam Pinter. That vessel did not stop and other vessels ignored radio calls for help. (The Norman Voyager has since gone to the rescue of the two-masted yacht Zeewind, which had a suspected heart-attack victim on board.)
Things were buzzing on a British Columbia ferry when several thousand angry bees escaped from their hives. The bee owner had arranged with the ferry company that his truck was loaded first, the ferry’s rear doors would be opened for air flow, and all lights would be turned off except emergency lighting. It was, they weren’t, they weren’t, the bees got warm and excited by the lights and so out they buzzed.
The People’s National Movement Government of Trinidad bought a used high-speed, 450-passenger catamaran ferry in Turkey for $3.29 million, had it transported to Trinidad and then towed to Curaçao for repairs (another three-quarter million) in 2008. The ferry is back in Trinidad and lies in a shipyard at Chaguaramas, still unused and very definitely for sale.
An overcrowded ferry carrying sixty pilgrims capsized on the Ganges in India’s northernmost province of Uttar Pradesh and only twenty were rescued. In Bangladesh an overloaded ferry (80 on board) collided with a sand barge and sank, killing at least two-dozen passengers.
In the UK at Plymouth, smoke kept 62 passengers on the Commodore Clipper for several hours although the ferry was docked and the fire in a refrigerator truck on the vehicle deck had been extinguished while en route from Jersey. The ferry also had some steering problems, perhaps because of the fire.
Legal Matters
Edison Chouest Offshore, a supplier and operator of specialized vessels for the US Government and operator of a sizable fleet of other specialized vessels, was implicated in “magic pipe” incidents on the ice-breaking Antarctic research vessel Laurence M. Gould in 2004-2005. And the US government dismissed an investigation of a possible ”magic pipe” episode on the Margit Gorthon (now the Forest Trader), and both the company and chief engineer walked free. This was the second instance in the month that a case triggered by whistle-blowers was withdrawn.
The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (reputed to be a liberal bunch of judges) ruled that a mariner who had not been physically injured but was endangered due to an event in which a third party was severely injured or killed could file suit. In the specific instance, a fisherman didn’t even witness a collision but felt the circumstances of the event had put him in grave and imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and had emotionally impacted him so he could not work.
Illegal Imports
For some time, South American narcotic-smugglers have been building and using, with considerable success, semi-submersible ”submarines” to import drugs into the US, and now Ecuadorian authorities, with help from the US DEA, have seized a true submarine, a submersible capable of operating at a depth of 65 feet. The 30-metre fiberglass vessel was built in a remote jungle area, has a conning tower with periscope, two diesels to electric motors to two screws, and air scrubbers to purify the air, and was to be crewed by up to six smugglers.
US agents found illegal immigrants who had taken unpaid passage on the container ship MSC Debra from the Dominican Republic to Charleston, South Carolina. Crewmen detained one, another jumped overboard and was later captured, and a third was found dead in a shipping container. And seventeen illegals, all badly dehydrated, were discovered in the back of an articulated lorry (semi-trailer truck) at Dover.
Metal-Bashing
Shipbuilding prices are low and bargains seem to be available even though the price of steel rose $40-50 a ton in the last quarter over the prevailing $750/ton. For example, one small company ordered ten tankers from South Korean builders for delivery in 2011 and 2012. And fears of a surplus of bulkers were expressed after owners signed contracts for more than 74 bulkers in June alone. This was in addition to the 93 ordered in May. But deliveries of newbuild bulkers meant that some older bulkers were idled.
After months of shilly-shallying, Canada decided it will build six corvette-sized Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships after all. Construction will start after two (more) years of planning. (Interestingly, several sources agree that the lightly armed, icebreaking ships will be remarkably big 6,000-tonners, which is in the destroyer size-range for many nations.)
Almost 4,000 feet of steel piping will be replaced on each of two Swedish icebreakers. Used in the replacements on the Atle and Frej will be glassfiber-reinforced epoxy piping.
Nature
Where are the Earth’s magnetic poles? Not diametrically opposite each other and each roams around a bit. The North MP is relatively stable when compared with the SMP, which has moved an average of 11 km a year over the last 100 years. But it can move faster, sometimes moving several hundred km a day. A swift Australian scientist managed to get within 1.6 km of the South MP when it paused for several hours one day back in 2000. That was the closest anyone has gotten close to the SMP for a measurement and it is also probably the closest anyone will ever get.
In spite of an international law eight years ago forbidding use of asbestos in new ships, some are still being delivered with asbestos in thousands of gaskets and other seals. Replacement of illegal parts on one ship, the 8,400-dwt Caroline Essberger, may have cost 10 percent of the original cost of building since the ship was in service. The process was not easy (“shut down everything, drain systems of their rapidly cooling heavy fuel oil, drain the black sticky residue into the bilges, clean out the bilges, ….”).
Building extensive wind-turbine farms offshore (the UK alone will install 6,000 such turbines in the next ten years) may be delayed by a lack of suitable installation and transportation vessels. There are only a dozen or so of suitable vessels worldwide and many of these can find work in the better-paying oil/gas industry.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
German law states that piracy is purely a police matter so German warships cannot escort German ships in pirate-infested waters. Some German shipowners temporarily reflag their ships so onboard security contractors can do their thing. The Liberian flag is a favorite.
A Dutch submarine will provide realtime intelligence in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean by sophisticated eavesdropping of pirate activity.
Pirates often shoot-up their intended victims. How extensive the damage can be was indicated by repairs made to the small German container ship Taipan. Almost 300 bullet holes were welded over and ground flush on both sides. Cabling was repaired in 80 places while many tempered-glass panes were replaced including 18 in the wheelhouse. Then there were the interior bulkheads and ceilings, doors, and cabinetry, etc.
As the Somali pirates’ success rates reflected the increasingly effective opposition, the pirates shifted to using six to ten skiffs in an attack. And some mother vessels are still at large in open waters and are running short of supplies so the primary focus of attacks may shift from ransom money to food and water, and yachts and tourist yachts and the like may be attacked. Violence may also increase.
Many pirates moved to the Bab al Mendeb and Red Sea areas—there were six attacks in the month as opposed to three attacks for the year’s first five months. Unfavorable monsoon conditions and the increased effectiveness of naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden were probable reasons for the shift.
In west Africa, Nigerian gunmen attacked two cargo vessels, killing one and seizing twelve sailors Two days later, special security forces stormed the BBC Polonia, and also (the details are very confused, something not unusual in that area) somehow freed the twelve mariners plus three other hostages taken in May.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
The director of Tampa’s aquarium was nervous about tests of seawater brought in by a barge owned by the Mosaic Fertilizer Company – after all, there had been a massive oil spill in the Gulf…. (The water tested just fine.) For some years, water in the aquarium tanks has been periodically replaced by seawater donated by various barge companies whose empty barges load up in offshore Gulf of Mexico waters while returning to Tampa. The donations save the aquarium about $300,000 a year.
A memento of the world’s largest ship, a 36-ton anchor, was shipped to Hong Kong to be an exhibit in the new Hong Kong Maritime Museum. The Knock Nevis/Jahre Viking/Seawise Giant was scrapped earlier this year in India at Gujarat. The biggest moving object ever built by man, the tanker was 1,503 feet long, displaced 564,763 tons, and had a draft such that she couldn’t pass through the English Channel (or enter many ports) when fully loaded. As Seawise Giant, she was sunk by an Iraqi jet in 1986 during the Iran-Iraq war. She was raised, repaired, and renamed.
A retired Coast Guard officer was hired in April to head up North Carolina’s ferry operations. He found “nepotism, payroll padding, and questionable spending” and reported this to his superiors and the inspector general. They fired him for not being a team builder.
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